Old Shelton Trail to Roosevelt Forest

Trail to Arthurs Court on
Stratford's new Roosevelt Forest map

The trail entrance is obscure, but decades of travel have kept the trail open. It begins at the Arthurs Court cul-de-sac in Shelton and ends in Roosevelt Forest.  Travelers head west through State property to an old lane running north-south. South is Roosevelt Forest, north is Route 8. The old lane seems to be a closed section of Beaver Dam Road that once continued to Armstrong Road, near Staples.

AllTrails shows the trail off Arthurs Court

The Shelton Trails Committee didn't know the trail existed, and there was no formal maintenance or marking over the years that we know of. Then the Town of Stratford published a new Roosevelt Forest map that showed the trail network extending all they way up to Arthurs Court in Shelton. Turned out this trail is also depicted on the various online maps such as AllTrails, Gaia, and OpenStreetMap. These maps are generated by the public and can be (and often are) in error. Still, it was interesting to see this trail in Shelton that we had never heard about shown on so many maps. 

Where did the trail come from? We asked our friends on Facebook about it, and a few said they had biked and even rode horses on the trail for decades. Lidar maps show the tread well-sunken into the ground. The old lane is shown on a Shelton map from 1867. 

Which brought up the fact that the blue-blazed Paugussett Trail originally went all the way from Monroe to Roosevelt in Stratford. CFPA decommissioned the trail south of Indian Well in the 1960s, but locals kept using segments of it. Could this be related? 

A 1946 map of the Paugussett Trail shows the trail following the old lane all the way from Roosevelt Forest to Armstrong Road in Shelton (Route 8 did not exist).  That section of the Paugussett was abandoned decades ago, but the old road and the access trail to Arthurs Court lived on in local knowledge. The image below is the 1946 trail map lined up with a current GIS/satellite image. 

1946 Paugussett Map overlay on satellite view
Blue line is the old Paugussett Trail

A Facebook post on the Shelton Trails group asking for info resulted in several people with old time knowledge of the trail as well as conflicting information about whether the public could park there and access the trail. After conferring with the Shelton Police Department, it was determined that it was legal to park on the road and head through the woods onto the trail so long as hikers do not stray onto private property. The City of Shelton does own a public right-of-way heading into the woods off the end of the cul-de-sac, all the way to the State of Connecticut property. The City GIS map below shows the trail in relation to property line. 

Property line map showing trail in red