NOW at the Waterbury Library

Photographs from the continuing series, "Brass Valley Made in America," are on exhibition at the Silas Bronson Library in Waterbury, from June 3 to July 31.

An Invitation
WHEN: June 19th at 6:30 PM
WHERE: Silas Bronson Library, Waterbury (http://www.bronsonlibrary.org/)
WHAT: Emery Roth will show slides, talk about his experiences, and read poems and stories from the draft of his book on Brass Valley. For three years Mr. Roth has been following the old railroad tracks and photographing among ruins and in the last working brass mill in the Naugatuck Valley. Thanks to the existence of a unique extruder, one brass mill continues operation. It is the last descendent of American Brass with functioning mill buildings in Ansonia and Waterbury. Mr. Roth's photographs capture the men and equipment at work, the large casting furnaces, the extruder, pickling tanks, draw benches, annealers still functioning in a facility that has been making brass tube since before WW I.


Tuesday, May 1, 2007

The Hollow


It is the most mannerly of farmsteads because it grew where the hollow flattens out in good, dry land. The barns are also in relatively good repair. The large barns were once cow barns, and I'm told it was for a time a horse farm. Because it lies at the bottom of the of The Hollow, I call it, "The Hollow Farm," but it is hollow in another sense too. Nothing happens here. The barn doors are shut, the barns are still except for the birds, vivacious inhabitants.

I haven't been inside the barns and can't say much about their age. I was invited to climb up into the loft of "the wood shed," a barn structure used currently as a garage. It appears to be quite old, and local history tells that the farmhouse was burned twice during The Revolution. This is prime farmland that has been lived on for a long time.