An animal sanctuary in Newtown, Connecticut is a labor of love for a mother whose daughter died in the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting. The Catherine Violet Hubbard Animal Sanctuary began its next chapter with an old-fashioned barn raising.
Jenny Hubbard pulls on a white construction helmet and strolls onto a construction site. She taps in a peg with a mallet. A few minutes later, a crane raises the first beams for what will become the sanctuary’s first permanent structure.
“A barn raising is really the first day where you’re really getting a lot of the timbers and frames in the air," said Roger Barrett Jr. with Country Carpenters — one of the builders on the project. He said it’s an old New England tradition — one that usually involves pulling in friends and neighbors to pitch in and make the work go faster.
“We won’t be able to get to rafters today, but once you get your lower floors assembled, you can throw rafters on it and you have a beautiful outline of the building almost the first day, first two-three days typically," he said.
“It’s been a project that literally is ten years in the making," Jenny Hubbard said. Jenny’s daughter was one of 20 children killed in the shooting twelve years ago, along with six educators.
“Her passion and commitment was to caring for animals," she said. "She just had this wish and wanted them to know that she was kind and that in her care, they would be safe.”
After Catherine’s death, Jenny decided to honor her daughter’s wish by building a place in Newtown that could live up to it. The state of Connecticut gave her a 34-acre property in the heart of Newtown. She’s spent 12 years turning it into the Catherine Violet Hubbard Animal Sanctuary.
“The mission of the sanctuary and the work that we do is to ensure all animals live free from harm in native habitats and safely in homes," she said. "We do that by delivering care directly to animals, and we teach how to care for animals and the habitats they live in.”
They’ve hosted regular animal-themed parties and festivals — including a day for butterflies, Catherine’s favorite animal. They’ve set up acres of preserve for animals and hiking trails and spearheaded an initiative that helps elderly people care for their pets. And for more than a decade, they’ve done it without an actual permanent building on the property.
“It’s a tough haul," she said. "Our programming up until this point was under tents, in borrowed spaces, weather dependent. We had a few field trips here at the sanctuary, but the construction of Catherine’s Learning Barn allows us a dedicated space to really launch and continue to deliver our educational initiatives. It’s an exciting moment.”
Jenny said it will offer a place for regular field trips, farm-to-table cooking classes and workshops for people who care for animals, like wildlife rehabilitators. Jenny says the barn should be done by the spring of 2025. And she hopes to see it bustling.
“School busloads of children -- K-6 curriculum we have already written," she said. "Community programming — we’ll be able to welcome year-round events. It will really be a plethora of community and educational work that people will encounter when they come.”
But there’s more to come, she said.
“We still have our sights on a main facility and a veterinary intake facility that will be, they’re living buildings so they’re completely sustainable buildings," she says. "So we’ve got a lot on the horizon.”
And she said Catherine would have loved to see it all come together.
