Ballouville

It is through a post office window that Joan Gosselin beholds life in Ballouville. Dozens of times a day, her gaze is coaxed by the slam of a car door or the fleeting glimpse of a figure passing by. Handing out mail, she provides a symphony of small talk with choruses that echo throughout the day.

The Australian Laughing Thrush wails, the orange-beaked Zebra finches twitter and the fish tank filters bubble.

Everyone who lives in Ballouville—all 110 post office box holders—is bound to pass through Arthur Berube’s pet store sooner or later. They have to if they want their mail from Gosselin.

So suffice it to say, Berube and Gosselin know quite a bit about everyone in town.

Today, the two are engaged in a gentle debate within the paneled walls of the tiny post office in this village, bisected by the picturesque Five Mile River.

Even on the busiest days, when a truck brings in fresh fish for the pet store or Social Security checks roll in, their jobs leave plenty of time for idle chatter. Still, it is obvious that this is not a topic that has crossed their counters before.

“Do you think people in Ballouville are poor?” the gentle-spoken Berube turns to Gosselin and asks.

He poses the question in a way that says he cannot believe there could be any answer but “no.”

“You don’t know the debt they have behind those envelopes,” says Gosselin, who knows more than she is telling Berube at this moment.

Berube shrugs his shoulders and goes back to work.

The Hartfords and New Havens have not cornered the market on poverty in a state that is defined by its wealth.

Nine of the fifteen poorest communities in Connecticut have populations under twenty thousand, by some estimates. Eastern Connecticut has more than its fair share, with several towns poorer than Bridgeport, when measured by the personal income of their residents. The town of Killingly, hard against the Rhode Island border and home to Ballouville, is among them. And, residents here are losing ground. In 1991, the average Ballouville resident was earning about 48 percent of the state average, but seven years later, in 1998, that number had dropped even further, to 45 percent, IRS figures show.

“We call it poverty with a view,” quips David Shumway, who is reminded daily that the northeast corner is a distant runner in today’s sophisticated economic race. Now, as that so-called New Economy struggles to fend off a national recession and deal with the aftermath of the September 11 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, Shumway fears that places like Ballouville will be among the first to lose their tenuous place-markers. Even in the height of the prosperous times during a single month in the summer of two thousand, his homeless shelter in the Danielson section of Killingly turned away eighty people because no beds were available. A year earlier for the same period, just five people were shut out. More and more, the people who do stay there have jobs.

Killingly is the industrial anchor of a predominantly rural county and has attracted new companies as the stalwart industries have departed. The region’s average wages in July were the lowest in the state, however, and its unemployment rate was Connecticut’s third highest, state labor department figures show. One-third of Killingly residents have no high school diploma, the town’s dropout rate is nearly twice the state average and about thirteen percent of all births are to teenage mothers. Windham County has the highest percentage of asthma cases among children in the state, and there is but one dentist in the entire county who accepts Medicaid patients.

To tell the easily overlooked story of the rural working poor in a state of breathtaking wealth, The Courant visited Ballouville over the past year. Here, in one of the state’s poorest villages, the average resident makes about fourteen thousand dollars annually, about forty-five percent of Connecticut’s average, the IRS estimates.

In this section of Killingly there is a woman who can...