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New Canaan There & Then: Friday Night Lights—A Brief History of Dunning Stadium

By Nick Williams, Board Governor, New Canaan Museum and Historical Society | January 22, 2026

‘New Canaan There & Then’ is sponsored by Brown Harris Stevens Realtors Bettina Hegel, Joanne Santulli and Dawn Sterner. The site Niche.com recently named New Canaan the 8th-ranked “Best School District for Athletes in America” for 2026, out of 9,934 school districts reviewed. Given the townspeople’s somewhat obsessive enthusiasm for athletics generally, that ranking is, as the inimitable Captain Quint quipped in the movie Jaws, “Not a bad reputation for this location.”

At least a small part of the ranking is undoubtedly due to the existence of Dunning Stadium, which since 1997 has been the home of the New Canaan Rams in multiple sports, served as the High School’s annual graduation venue, hosted events such as Division 1 NCCA lacrosse games and the NFL’s Northeast Regional Flag Football Tournament, and been acclaimed as “one of the premier high school athletic facilities” in New England. The genesis of Dunning Stadium was simple: a desire for Friday night lights. 

It’s hard to believe, but the New Canaan High School football team wasn’t always the veritable colossus that it is today. Indeed, in 1980 the New York Times wrote about, “New Canaan Football Fans; Hope for Better Times,” reporting on the painful fall of the team from excellence in the late 1960s and early ‘70s to three consecutive years without a single victory in 1978-1980.

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New Canaan There & Then: Murder in the Next Station to Heaven

By Nick Williams, Board Governor, New Canaan Museum and Historical Society | January 8, 2026

‘New Canaan There & Then’ is sponsored by Brown Harris Stevens Realtors Bettina Hegel, Joanne Santulli, Dawn Sterner and Pam Stutz. The blazing inferno could be seen from miles away, despite the mid-November gloom enveloping New Canaan that morning in 1898. 

Lewis P. Child saw the smoke from his stately home on West Road and immediately set out for town on his bicycle to raise the alarm. By the time he and other responders made it to the farm on Cheese Spring Road, it was too late. Both house and barn were already gone. But what came as a complete shock to the would-be rescuers was the sight of a middle-aged man dangling from the limb of a lonely apple tree near a stone wall abutting the property.

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New Canaan There & Then: ‘The Ice Storm’

By Nick Williams, Board Governor, New Canaan Museum and Historical Society | December 12, 2025

‘New Canaan There & Then’ is sponsored by Brown Harris Stevens Realtors Bettina Hegel, Joanne Santulli, Dawn Sterner and Pam Stutz. It’s Thanksgiving, 1973, and in New Canaan, as elsewhere, kids have come home from school and families have gathered to celebrate the traditional start of the holiday season. That’s the backdrop of The Ice Storm, the 1997 masterpiece of suburban affluence, family dysfunction and quiet desperation.  Directed by Ang Lee, the screenplay written by James Schamus was adopted from the 1994 novel of the same name by former New Canaan resident Rick Moody. The Ice Storm was filmed primarily in New Canaan; in fact there is so much of New Canaan presented on screen – Town Hall, the Metro-North Station, the old Varnum’s Pharmacy, Saxe playing fields, the (original) New Canaan Library, and several Mid-Century Modern homes nestled in our hilly woods – that it is difficult to imagine any other town filling the void.  

Ironically one of the few scenes that was not shot in New Canaan, the infamous Thanksgiving night “key party” gathering, was actually filmed in Greenwich. The Ice Storm featured a mix of then seasoned and up-and-coming actors, including Kevin Kline and Joan Allen as Ben and Elena Hood (701 Laurel Road), and Jamie Sheridan and Sigourney Weaver as their best friends and  neighbors, Jim and Janey Carver (581 Laurel Road); filming at both addresses included exterior and interior shots.  Tobey Maguire, Christina Ricci, Elijah Wood, Katie Holmes and Allison Janney rounded out the outstanding cast.  

The film grossed only $16 million worldwide, but was highly acclaimed critically, including receipt of the Palme d’Or for Best Screenplay at the Cannes Film Festival and Gene Siskel lauding it as his favorite film of 1997.

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New Canaan There & Then: A Local Gem—The Little Red Schoolhouse

By Nick Williams, Board Governor, New Canaan Museum and Historical Society | November 6, 2025

‘New Canaan There & Then’ is sponsored by Brown Harris Stevens Realtors Bettina Hegel, Joanne Santulli, Dawn Sterner and Pam Stutz. Steve Karl was four years old the first time he visited the one-room Little Red Schoolhouse on Carter Street in town. “I remember the tiny wooden desks lined up in neat rows,” he recalled. “I remember the outdoor manual water pump in the front yard that we loved to play around with. I also have a vivid memory of the oil painting of Aesop’s fables above the entrance to the classroom, facing the students.” 

That mural, and four others, were the product of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration and painter Justin Gruelle, who was part of the Silvermine Group of Artists, in 1936.