Roosterville Road has a new, locally-made signpost, pictured above. It stands where the short, dead-end road begins on the west side of Rt. 8 in lower New Boston.

This photo of the sign was posted by Bob Platt on Connect Sandisfield/Facebook early last month. Bob, did you make it? Did you install it?

Roosterville is an often-overlooked section of Town. Great people live on Roosterville Road, their homes strung along the narrow pavement like pearls on a string.

A one-lane bridge leads off to the right, at the site of the Old Red Shop, a manufacturing building once the largest structure in Sandisfield, long since disappeared. The bridge crosses the Farmington and leads past the Platt family's original home and up Clark Road that used to wind its way to the top of Hanging Mountain. The road, legally closed for over fifty years and totally obscured with trees and brush, is hardly walkable now and absolutely undrivable. But on MapQuest, the road still exists. Don't believe MapQuest and don't go there.

The name Roosterville is something of a mystery. It might have been misnamed for the many chicken farms that used to populate Town Hill Road and Montville in the 1920s to the '50s and supplied surrounding towns with thousands of chicken dinners, including even Boston and New York City.

The level ground around Roosterville was part of Solomon Deming's farm from the 1750s, the first farm in New Boston (and possibly all of Township 3). It was Deming land for 150 years, down through Francis Deming who many of us knew well. It's been since farmed by the Tuffy Campetti family and in a sense still is. Dawn Campetti, Tuffy's daughter, now farms that land with her husband, Eric Pachulski.

In any event, please no one tell the Rand-McNally people that Roosterville is still on their Massachusetts road maps. Not as a road, but as a little town.

I have their 2025 United States Road Atlas and there it is, a town called Roosterville, just north of the Connecticut border. I, for one, would hate for the map people to decide Roosterville doesn't exactly exist. To us in Sandisfield, it does and always will. And now we have a rooster on the road sign to prove it.