About Citizens For Easton

I’m often asked what Citizens for Easton does. I am always happy to respond that we do just what we did when the group was formed in 1972 – to maintain what has kept our town so special.

It sounds simple – and to a large extent it is – but it has also involved a great deal of listening, arguing, cajoling, work and worry. And it’s involved a lot of support – specifically, yours. Keeping a town like Easton unspoiled has been an uphill battle, but we knew that we needed to act – and to act with great conviction – or the legacy we wanted to leave for our children would be lost forever.

And that was our heritage.

Like many towns in Fairfield County, Easton went through a building boom in the ’90s. But with the dust cleared, and new developments aborn, we realized that something special was about to be lost forever.

Unlike other towns in Fairfield County, Easton has maintained strong ties to its deep past if only because those ties were so elemental to its character and geographic isolation. We are a town that lies “between” or beyond much larger towns; we are rocky, wooded and rugged which for most of its history has made Easton inconvenient for development if not necessarily for the construction of reservoirs. Those reservoirs in turn made us – through a sheer and spectacularly propitious coincidence – allied with one of the most important movements of the 20th century, the environmental one.

The linkage was simple and obvious: Easton had to protect its woodlands because it had to protect its watershed, and it had to protect its watershed because it had to protect the water source for a quarter of a million people directly to our south. Preservation not only came naturally to us, but in time became our duty.

Easton, of course, was much much more than that. We were a farm town for much of our history, with every acre cultivated and every rock thrown upon the nearest rock wall – until new rocks poked up through the soil the following spring. But farmers – being practical and hard-working men and women – in time found better land, or less difficult terrain, elsewhere. Many moved on, leaving but a handful that remains to this day.

As much as the reservoirs, woods, rolling hills, rock walls and historic homes, they remain pillars of Easton’ s character, and their continued support is a primary part of CFE’s mission as well.

CFE exists because our heritage is under assault. No one is to “blame.” No one is a “culprit.” It is simply a byproduct of modern life, which insists on profit, progress, and the pursuit of happiness.

Our role: To preserve what has made our town so special.
We started this website for several reasons. Foremost, we want to communicate to our members those many developments that affect our town and region on a daily basis. We encourage you to write in, tell us your thoughts, and what’s bothering you, and what we at CFE should be paying attention.

Meanwhile, here’s another way for you to contribute: Send us your photos of Easton, and we’ll make them part of our on-going “slide show.”
Finally, we have created this site – your site – to reach out to you. We want you to join us because CFE isn’t just an isolated local group, we are your neighbors who are concerned about our town and our town’s future.

CFE, in other words, is you.

Thanks for checking in. We look forward to hearing from you.

Verne Gay,
President