Time and the river lend luster to Riverton inn

"This is one of the most popular rooms," Telford said of our guest room, No. 2. "People really like the old spinning wheel." The second-floor room is large and square and focuses on the ornate, white-painted mantel over a nonoperational fireplace. Like much of the inn, the walls are covered in wallpaper with elaborate designs, in this case a pattern of birds among trailing pink roses. The embroidered pillows and coverlet of the king-size bed pick up the floral motif. A Victorian fainting couch with a good reading light sits beside a window and the signature spinning wheel sits between another pair of windows.

Those windows offer a view across the road to the Farmington River and the riverbank factory of the Hitchcock Chair Co. Lambert Hitchcock started making furniture here in 1826 and established a reputation for fine craftsmanship and distinctive stenciling before the business closed in 1864. The factory reopened in 1946 during the boom for Colonial Revival furniture, but the final closing in 2006 hit the community hard. Before the village became Riverton in 1866, it had been called Hitchcocksville.

Naturally enough, Hitchcock furniture figures prominently in the inn's decor. Room No. 2 has a lovely chair parked at a matching writing desk that doubles as a night table. All the tables and chairs in the first-floor dining room are Hitchcock. The dining room itself was created in 1940 by joining several smaller spaces to make a large room that seats 90 people. That's a lot of chairs. "See how heavy and wellmade the older ones are," Telford pointed out as she seated us for dinner.