By CLARA ROSE THORTON - Published: November 13, 2008
If people would say they were from there, we'd laugh and call that place the 'armpit of America.'"
So recalls longtime Springfield resident Andi Barrows with a smirk when presented with the notion of Bellows Falls, a village of 3,500 along the Connecticut River Byway, in the southeastern corner of the state. To look at its quaint downtown that seems cut out of a photo essay from the 1930s, it is not difficult to imagine that if 60 percent of its storefronts were vacant and entire side streets rarely visited, it would certainly have the air of some post-apocalyptic remnant of a once-thriving mill town -- at once stagnant, leeching and left-behind.
