KENT, Conn.—Most Kent residents would recognize Christine Adams as the savvy new director of the Kent Historical Society and a preservationist who has advocated for safeguarding some of the region’s most venerable—and vulnerable—structures.
But the many-faceted Adams is also a poet, who has just published her second collection of poems in a slim little volume titled “Breaking Bread” [Kelsay Books]. It follows her first collection, “Setting the Table in the Age of Reason” [Propertius Press], which was published in 2024.
Both books have received rave reviews—“Age of Reason” lauded as “an atmospheric, gentle, yet purposeful wandering through the tactile pleasures of everyday life” and “Baking Bread” drawing accolades for evoking a hunger “for this delicious life, but also for the grit, darkness, and mystery of it.”
She has written poetry throughout her life but said the two collections grew out of her feelings following her 2018 divorce. “I wanted to find my authentic self,” she recounted. “Writing was part of that process. The first collection focused on getting back to that authentic self—it is mainly a love story to my three children, saying, ‘Here are your flaws. Aren’t they beautiful? You may not be perfect, but you can still do good things.’”
Her follow-up collection, “Breaking Bread,” has been described as a “French menu” of offerings, “a feast for the eye, ear, and mind.” George Witte, author of an “Abundance of Caution,” writes, “These poems of family, friendships, places, seasons, and the pleasures of reading and language comprise the bread that Adams bakes and shares with the reader ‘to eat,’ to be fulfilled.”
“A poem is a like a keyhole,” she said, “a small look into a larger space. I’ve always written poems since I was a child, but I never shared them before. I went to Gettysburg College and studied with Peter Stitt, a world-class poet who founded the Gettysburg Review. All these amazing poets came there—it was an amazing opportunity.”
She says inspiration for her poems can come at any time. “I carry a small journal and jot ideas down. It never happens at a desk—when I’m driving or walking, I think of lines or a way to say something. I have lots of snippits in my journal.”
She is contemplating a third poetry collection, but at present her focus is on chronicling the history of the cottage she purchased in New Preston following her divorce. After having lived abroad and worked in New York, the move was a return to a familiar landscape and her alter ego as a historian.
“My family has been in Connecticut since the 17th century,” she said. “More recently, we have kept a cottage on Lake Waramaug for the last 100 years. It’s one of the last remaining original structures there and we’ve summered there for generations. Nowhere has felt more like home to me. It has been a truly special place.
“In 2018 after my divorce, I bought my own cottage in New Preston,” she continued. “In the process of doing a title search on it, I got stuck in 1845. The deed is not in the Washington Town Hall.”
Seeking “concrete answers” to the building’s origins, she eventually discovered that in 1823 it was a stonecutter’s shop. “The history has been kind of hard to determine,” she said, “but when I got back to 1812, but there was a reference to an earlier deed.”
She’s identified previous owners dating back more than 200 years and believes an earlier inhabitant, Ephraim Smith, may have built the home.
Her knowledge expanded further as she tore the interior apart during renovations. “You can see ‘marriage marks’ in the dining room,” she said. Marriage marks are reference numbers or symbols etched into the wood that allowed timber framers to label the custom-fitted joints as an aid to assembling the structure.
In the process of researching the house she sought out networks of information, consulting with Melanie Marks, founder and principal researcherof CT House Histories, LLC. “CT House History has helped me figure out the cottage’s history,” Adams said. “As we worked together, Melanie said I would make a great trustee, which I was for one term. But I have had to cut back on volunteerism.”
Indeed, she has been busy in both historic preservation—collaborating with local institutions such as the Gunn Memorial Library and serving for three years on the board of the Kent Historical Society—and also serving on the Inland Wetlands Commission in Washington, Conn., the Board of Directors for the Lake Waramaug Conservancy and the Lake Waramaug Task Force.
All this volunteerism led to a “happy coincidence” last December when the Kent Historical Society’s previous director departed and she was able to slip into that role. “Our mission is to preserve and share the stories of Kent,” she said. “But the Swift House would be the preservation of something that is tangible. It’s nice to jump in and say, ‘This is something that needs to be done.’”
Even as she encourages the preservation of Swift House, she is working to memorialize the history of her own cottage in her next book, a historic memoir titled “Homespun, a Biography of a Connecticut Cottage.”
