Haddam Home Tours a Success

Saturday’s rainy start had organizers of the Haddam Garden Club worried.

For months they had planned their Historic Home and Garden Tours for this day and for the past few weeks had worked feverishly on their homes to get them ready.  The event was to serve as the group’s major fundraiser, in part for public garden installations in town.

“I woke up and just cried,” said club member Jackie Landsberg, an organizer of the event who owns one of the seven homes that were on the tour, the first ever such event for the garden club.

By midday, however, the club’s members realized the rain was doing little to dampen the spirits of participants. Landsberg, entertaining visitors in the living room of her 1720s saltbox Colonial on Jacoby Road, cheerfully announced that some 350 people bought tickets for the tours.

“Everybody’s having fun, everyone’s enjoying themselves. We’ve heard some people say it’s the best homes tour they’ve ever seen.”

A few miles away Stewart Gillmor was pouring tastings of his homemade wine at the historic home that he and his wife, Rogene Gillmor, own on Spencer Road. While Stewart Gillmor stood beneath a large umbrella at a table, a circle of visitors standing with him, members of the garden club took others through the Gillmor’s historic home, built in four sections over two centuries and part of which was moved here from Chester.

Milling around Landsberg’s kitchen, sisters Lisa Parlapiano and Patti Allen said they were impressed with the homes and gardens on the tour.

“They were surreal,” Allen said. “We didn’t expect them to be so beautiful. You expected them to be pretty, but this …. “

“It’s probably the best $20 I’ve ever spent in my life,” Parlapiano said.