Head north out of Manhattan for about 60 miles and you’ll come to a little Connecticut town called Trumbull. It’s not the biggest town in the Constitution State, or the wealthiest, or the quietest, but it’s a lovely place to settle down and raise children. In fact, all the things that Trumbull isn’t explain why so many New Yorkers end up buying a house in Connecticut, and in this particular town.
Full of regal maple trees and rows of colonial, red-brick buildings, Trumbull is a haven for anyone who wants to escape the hustle and bustle of the big city. Its parks are enchanting, its streets are inviting and the air is amazingly free of the pretense that you normally find in New York’s bedroom communities. Maybe that’s why it was named the 7th best place for families by Family Circle and the 15th best place to retire by Money magazine.
The town’s 36,000 residents love Trumbull for the way it epitomizes community life in America, from the bicentennial fountain in the town square to high school football in the fall. And they’re good at it too, this community life thing. Trumbull isn’t the only town that has a nature conservatory and a school marching band, but Trumbull’s nature conservatory has been nationally recognized and its school marching band has been voted the best in Connecticut for the last 10 years. Even the apple pie from Trumbull’s weekly farmers market tastes better than in other towns, they say.
As both a contemporary family town and a popular summer retreat for wealthy New Yorkers, Trumbull covers the spread when it comes to Connecticut real estate. You can find a reasonably large four-bedroom home in Trumbull for about $250,000 – and a very unreasonably large one for around $600,000. It all depends on whether you want to be closer to the high-tech recreation center or the soft, rolling plains of Fairfield County.
If you’re buying a house in Connecticut, you can’t do any better than Trumbull. It does small-town America better than most Connecticut towns, and the way things are going, it looks like Trumbull will hang onto the title for quite a while.
