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HOME-GROWN HOMES
Country Carpenters and Early New England Homes AwardedCTGrown Label
| Farm-to-Fork has, in recent years, gone from an environmental activist slogan to a staple of the mainstream. You see farmers markets popping up everywhere. It makes perfect sense: you end up with healthier, tastier food than the highly-processed stuff from the supermarket and you allow family-owned farms to stay in business, saving the rural land from development. |  |
If locally grown food makes sense, why not locally grown wood products? 1.7 million acres of Connecticut is forested–nearly 60 percent of the state. Wood products is a $160 million a year industry in this state and is responsible for thousands of jobs. In 2010, the Connecticut Department of Agriculture and the Connecticut Environmental Protection Agency decided to extend their popular CTGrown label associated with agricultural products grown in the state to forest products. To qualify for the label, the wood must be harvested following environmental guidelines set by the Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection.
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One of the main proponents of extending the CTGrown label to wood products was Country Carpenters of Hebron. Country Carpenters was founded in 1984 by Roger Barrett Sr., who started offering Early New England style sheds and barns in pre-cut, color-coded post and beam building kits. Over the years, Country Carpenters has become the leader in their field, shipping kits to every state east of the Mississippi, as well as to Canada, England, and Ireland. In 2006, Roger Barrett Jr. opened Early New England Homes at Country Carpenters, offering period-style homes as pre-cut packages that could be shipped anywhere. |
Working primarily with wood from Hill Forest Products in Pomfret and other New England mills, Early New England Homes and Country Carpenters hand-craft their building packages at their work shops in Hebron and Bolton. In fact, the expansion of the CTGrown label to wood products was officially launched at a press conference with officials from the Connecticut Department of Agriculture and the Connecticut Department ofEnvironmental Protection which took place at the Early New England Homes workshop in Bolton on December 29, 2010.
| “While we do share that love of things hand-crafted in wood,” says Country Carpenters General Manager Paul Baker, “and while one of our goals is to continue producing the highest quality buildings of an early New England style, another one of our goals, which is equally important, is to promote a lifestyle by offering buildings built to a human scale–beautiful in their simplicity and that promote sustainability and living within one’s means.” |
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