Travel for a half hour northeast from Hartford, or the same distance southeast from Springfield, and if it is a roll-down-the-windows spring day, you will know immediately when you have entered the town of Ellington. No town nearby has the same omnipresent smell of manure when warm weather rolls around. Instantly recognizable, it lends the town its affectionate (or not) nickname, Smellington. But while it is possible to get used to manure, silage is a different story. The fermented corn stings your eyes even at a distance, makes your stomach flip-flop. But for the Holsteins, it is a gourmet dinner. Drive through the northern end of town and you will see them, just a spattering of black and white dots on far away hills of dirt, and then around a corner you are suddenly eye to eye with a whole fenced-in herd. Sometimes they are lumbering around, sometimes being fed in their long, white, metallic barns, every now and then they are running across the road (to freedom, they hope), but most often they are swishing their tails in the field, serenely chewing their cud. In the middle of one cow pen is a large green spiky cylinder, slightly at an angle above the ground. At first you are disbelieving but then you acknowledge that, yes, it is a cow scratching post. Every now and then a cow will rub up against it, probably sighing with contentment at scratching her itch. Further down the road are two rows of small circular pens, each one just roomy enough for a calf to move around in. Small children stand petting them, poking fistfuls of long grass through the pens and shrieking as the calves gather it up with rubbery lips.

On bright days, or just after it has rained, the fields are the most brilliant shades of green against a grey sky. Other days, the landscape has the feel of a more muted watercolor palette, as though Winslow Homer had painted some epic farm scene. Stand on the side of the road, just before grass gives way to corn seedlings, and see how vast the sky is. Later, when summer begins and the trucks have finished spraying arcs of manure over the field (look closely and you can see high school track stars sprinting out of the way so as not to be hit), the corn will emerge, shooting from sprouts to over your head in a matter of weeks. One large house in the middle of a field disappears from view every July, and elementary school children judge how much time is left in summer vacation by the height of the lush green stalks.

The only traffic jams here occur when farm equipment, massive wheels alone towering over mere cars, lumbers its way down the road with a train of cars behind it. The combine is usually driven by a Bahler boy, and if not there is one hanging out the window. They all have the same round, broad, freckled faces, buzz-cut blond hair, clear blue eyes, and stocky build. Theirs is the house with a sign for fresh eggs or farm fresh tomatoes. The youngest – how old is he? – looks absurdly small driving that great creaking dragon down the main road. Bahler, Luginbuhl, Hoffman, Zahner – the Swiss names you hear over and over, the owners of the remaining farms since the late 19th century and many of the older stores and services in town. They go to church all day Sunday and Wednesday evening, and the women always wear long skirts and buns in their hair. They live simply, without televisions or Christmas decorations, and at least one family makes sausage in their basement.

At the center of town is the green, with a white gazebo in the center where high school juniors and seniors gather in gowns and tuxedos every May to smile endlessly for prom pictures taken by what seems like everyone in town. The popular or creative seniors try to make the biggest entrance: two years ago one senior showed up with his date riding an enormous John Deere. The Congregational Church which owns the green stands facing it, pure white with a tall steeple, and as is typical of many old New England towns, the Catholic Church sits unobtrusively further on down the road. There is a small, square public library that harbors a crumbling, overgrown cemetery, and then the main cemetery across the street. Entering through its gates all is quiet save the birds and sometimes the track team going for a warm-up jog. Down the road is the oldest house in town, a rich red, barn-shaped house with a black roof and white trim. In 1730 it was built by Reverend John McKinstry, the first minister of the Congregational Church, on land that was once called the Great Marsh. At the town center you might also see Mildred Dimock, who has lived here all of her 92 years and still plants flowers in front of the library. When the ancient concrete posts lining the green were falling into disrepair, she spearheaded the restoration project. Her devotion to maintaining the beauty of the town is a glimpse of the work ethic embodied by many older Ellington residents, that of gladly working hard until one’s dying day.

As a result of the marshy ground the high school, on the same road, is a low, sprawling building that can only expand outwards, not upwards. A new purple sign by the side of the road proclaims that this is the “Home of the Knights.” Pass by around 2:00, and students will be revving their engines to peal out of the parking lot behind the school. Many drive pickup trucks in varying stages of shabbiness, a few of which bear a Confederate flag on the grill. It may be located in a liberal New England state, but in this nearly-all-white town extreme conservatism is a high school trend. In this school, where a black student has to be sent over from a neighboring town to fill an important part in a play or where the only openly gay student is known to all but a few as “the lesbian cheerleader” rather than her real name, most of the students are sheltered and some will never leave the town. Here the popular crowd can be easily recognized in the overcrowded hallways, dressed head to toe in Hollister and Abercrombie yet also sporting cowboy hats and singing along to the country music emanating from their iPods. In a town that is developing faster and faster, it has become fashionable among the youth to at least superficially reach out to its country roots.

Continue the drive south and you suddenly stumble across more and more housing developments, named after what used to be in their places. Mosely Plains, back in the north of town, was considered the “new development” from the time of its conception in the eighties until the next major development, Gasek Farms, appeared six years ago. Across from Deer Valley and Cornfield Apartments is a grassy section proclaiming itself to be a conservation area set aside by the builder of these developments. An unusually thoughtful gesture, until you find out that this piece of land is wetlands unsuitable for building anything upon. Further along, the frequency of these cookie-cutter developments becomes greater and greater. These have all sprung up during the last five years. On the hill above the small supermarket plaza, the neat rows of trees at Johnny Appleseed’s apple orchard can be discerned from the road, stretching up to the horizon. Johnny’s lanky, striding, cartoon figure featured on the sign is a recognizable town icon. Any kid in town could tell you that apples taste best when plucked from the tree and wiped off on a shirt, and that fall means stocking up on white paper bags full of the crisp fruit. However, instead of more open fields covering the rest of the hill, as there were barely a year ago, the orchard stops abruptly at row upon row of beige and grey boxy houses that make up the new landscape. Starkly exposed on the side of the hill, they are filled almost as quickly as they are built with bright-eyed SUV-drivers who are looking to raise their children in a charming rural setting.

The supermarket plaza, too, has changed within the last six months; in fact, it is incorrect to call it that. The unlit red letters that had spelled out “Ellington Supermarket” for twenty years are now broken or missing, reading something like “Ellintn Suprmet”. Pass by the garish plastic cow and blinding lights of Lee’s Auto Ranch, and you will see the reason for the demise of the friendly neighborhood supermarket. At the end of the largest parking lot in town looms an enormous Big Y, the supermarket chain whose arrival had been hotly contested but inevitable. Thousands of consumers mourned the loss of the mom-and-pop atmosphere and often-praised meat counter, dozens of high school students bemoaned their sudden loss of employment, and then they all shuffled over to resume their activities at the new store a month later. The latest debate is not whether or not a McDonald’s (the town’s first fast food restaurant) will be built in the same area, but how to make it as little of an eyesore as possible.

Abruptly you reach the southern border, picking up speed past the crowded buildings of the next town where it is immediately apparent that cornfields are out of the question. The further you travel into the heart of suburbia and shopping malls and later the urban outskirts of Hartford, the more the cows and tractors of Ellington take the vague shape of a distant childhood memory. But perhaps you will hold fast to that memory, knowing that somewhere back there is a little patch of field and sky and tradition, at least for the moment, as you hurtle on toward modernization.