Barkhamsted Traffic Ticket Lawyer

Barkhamsted, Connecticut

Barkhamsted occupies the northeastern corner of Litchfield County, up against the Hartford County line, and it was one of the last towns in Connecticut to be settled. White settlers didn’t arrive in numbers until the mid-1700s, and the town wasn’t formally incorporated until 1779, when it took its name from Berkhamsted in Hertfordshire, England. Even now it is less a single center than a scatter of seven villages — West Hill, Mallory, Barkhamsted Center, Center Hill, Washington Hill, Pleasant Valley, and Riverton — spread across forested hills along the Farmington River.

The single fact that most defines the town is one of absence. In the early 20th century the Metropolitan District Commission bought up Barkhamsted Hollow, the historic center of town, and flooded it to build the Barkhamsted Reservoir, a drinking-water supply for the Hartford region. Saville Dam, a 135-foot earthen embankment finished in 1940, holds the water back across the East Branch of the Farmington River, and the reservoir filled to capacity by 1948. The original town center now lies beneath the water — its foundations submerged — and Route 318, Saville Dam Road, carries traffic right across the top of the dam.

Much of what remains above water is protected land. The state owns large stretches of Barkhamsted as forest — People’s State Forest, the American Legion State Forest, and part of Tunxis State Forest — which keeps the town green and thinly built. Riverton, in the town’s north, is the best-known village: it has a main street listed on the National Register of Historic Places and hosts the Riverton Fair each October, a long-running celebration of the kind of rural community Barkhamsted has always been.

For a town this rural, traffic funnels onto a few key roads. U.S. Route 44 is the main east-west route through Barkhamsted, and Route 318 carries drivers across the dam and toward Pleasant Valley. Both see steady seasonal and commuter traffic — and the citations that come with it. We keep track of these corridors and the enforcement along them, which is usually where the violations covered below begin.