Mount Tom State Park: Connecticut's First Public Summit
Connecticut
The park tucked into the Litchfield Hills along this stretch of Route Two Oh Two is one of the oldest in Connecticut's state system, and the stone tower at its summit is one of the few places in the state where you can see four states at once.
Mount Tom State Park was established in nineteen fifteen, created as part of the first generation of Connecticut parks under the State Park Commission formed in nineteen thirteen. It was among the earliest of the fifteen parks established between nineteen thirteen and nineteen eighteen, and by some accounts the first to open to the public. That timing matters: in the early twentieth century, the idea of publicly owned land preserved for recreation rather than extraction was still relatively new, and Connecticut was building its system when the concept was just taking hold nationally.
The stone tower on the summit was built in nineteen twenty-one by a Litchfield contractor named John DaRoss, designed by architect Alfred Turner. DaRoss constructed it from rough black gneiss quarried on site, and the result is a thirty-four-foot structure that has become inseparable from the visual identity of the Litchfield Hills. On a clear day the view from the top reaches Mount Everett in the Taconics, the Catskills of New York, and on the clearest days a glimpse of Long Island Sound. The tower was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in nineteen ninety-three.
The park occupies two hundred thirty-one acres on the southwest shore of Mount Tom Pond, a small glacial lake that draws swimmers and paddlers in summer. The trails pass through mixed forest over exposed gneiss and quartz, the same ancient rock that forms the backbone of the Litchfield Hills.
The park is small enough that most people pass through in an afternoon, but the combination of a surviving early-twentieth-century stone tower, a public pond, and views that reach into three neighboring states makes it one of the more complete experiences this corner of Connecticut offers.
