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"Qui Transtulit..."

from
Qui Transtulit Sustinit:
He who transplanted, still
sustains - Connecticut State Motto

And so, the land can be read. Its hills and valleys are a geologic braille that records the events of hundreds of million of years of earth history. The high bumps of Proto-North America's Northwest Highlands and the ridges of Avalonia's Mohegan Range read continental collision. The Iapetos Ocean's rolling Windham Hills and Southwest Hills read former ocean. The wide basin of the Central Valley reads the break-up of a super continent.

The history of human interaction with the land may be read as well. Evidence of each phase of this history remains on the landscape. The stone walls, the hilltop farms and towns, and the gristmill dams of colonial times still stand. The valley mill towns of early industrial times are still here. And superimposed on top of the old, and often conforming to the old, is the modern landscape: the skyscrapers, suburbs, and superhighways of Connecticut's growing service economy. Each of these phases of land use has been affected by the geologic history that preceded it, linked by the tapestry of time: colonial towns and farms on the hilltops of the Collision terranes, milltowns in the valleys laid low by erosion, and urban centers in the Central Valley's Newark Terrane and along the gentle Coastal Slope.

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