School's Out

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: As my photographic explorations among the hills of Connecticut, New York and Massachusetts carry me further from home I've often been surprised at the number of one room school houses that remain standing. Perhaps because I grew up in the city, I used to imagine these old structures to be relics of the 19th century, and I wondered how it could be that they remain standing.

Fortunately, some have historical markers from which I've learned that in rural areas within an hour or two of New York City one room schoolhouses were common into the 1940s, and it is in their nature that there were many; sometimes one every two or three miles, as the students who attended them lived within walking distance. They also survive because memories maintain them; those who were students there in the thirties and forties will sometimes do the bit of upkeep and lobby to restore them. On the Connecticut side of the border many have been accepted as cultural artifacts worthy of town funds and historic preservation. More often, on the New York side of the border they are lonely places that show their age and remind us how time slips insidiously by and how much we have changed.


NOTE: Special thanks to my friend Martin Kimmeldorf who has taken two of my photos and edited and combined them with images and words of his own. I recommend visiting his sites:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/martinsphotoart/5987675496/in/photostream/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/martinsphotoart/5992404393/in/photostream/

Sightseeing

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL

EPILOGUE: My visit to Eastern State Penitentiary was brief. I spent the better part of two days photographing there, walking the abandoned passages, peering into decaying cells, looking for photographs. I was a visitor, an outsider, maybe an intruder. My only other encounter with a real prison was an architectural project many years ago that took me inside the Pittsburgh City Jail. It was still in operation, an apparently efficient place with real prisoners and guards and checkpoints, and I recall being struck by the disjunction between the functions of imprisonment and the refined, rusticated graciousness of H.H. Richardson's Victorian detailing and design. Even though I couldn't see the prisoners in their cells, the presence of real people beyond the bars made the architectural incongruity overpowering. It was the clash of incompatible worlds or of the facade of culture and the underbelly of expedience.

Eastern State Penitentiary's effect on me was quite different. It had opened 1829 and closed in 1970. It was 41 years since it held prisoners, since guards maintained strict security routines, since the cell blocks throbbed with the pulse of daily life. Whatever graciousness had been in the place had crumbled to brutality. At first I unconsciously expected to find the artifacts of the prison's 19th century residents, but the artifacts we found were left by the largely Black and Hispanic prisoners that were there when it closed, people I might pass in the street or meet today. In the public sections I blended with other tourists snapping vacation pictures into i-Phones. Had any been imprisoned here? Nostalgic return was unthinkable, or was that what the rest of us were doing?

I went from block to block, cell to cell looking for meaning behind the ruins and found the voices of 140 years of imprisonment merging like a chorus so that it was almost possible to forget that each cell held a real person, some good, some wicked, but all with similar yearnings: life, liberty, pursuit of happiness. Ultimately, however, the power of the experience rested on recalling that each ancient cell held a real person, that it had done so for 140 years, and that such institutions are everywhere and everywhere invisible.

Abandoned Concrete Factory, 2011

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: Our factories are empty and our prisons are full.

Cell Block Five

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: Prisons are places set apart from time. Those who go to prison speak of losing so many years of their lives, and when they return to society, they often find society has moved beyond them and they are stuck in a different place, faded and decades apart.

Shaft

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: 9X9, rowed, stacked, and locked - so many cells, so many lives walled off. It is a place to learn what it means to be truly alone.

Final Cut or Close Shave

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: Prisons of stone restrain the body; their boundaries are clear, fixed, easy to define. The mind's prisons entrap the spirit; their edges are shadowy, indeterminate, always menacing.

The Conk

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: A prison is a community. It's nature is dependent on the interactions of individuals.

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL 2:  Freedom exists even where there is no liberty.

Bunk Beds

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: Count the number of prisoners and measure the size of society's failure. That failure reverberates through time in broken families, lost lives, defeat, poverty and desolation.

Underworld Overview

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: Prisons are ideas, laws made stone, a foundation to support community and the Golden Rule, walls to make us trust, a blockhouse defense against the forces of entropy and madness.

Cell Block Fourteen

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: Prisons open a path into crime. They are outposts of the underworld where breezes mingle with whispering secrets sharp as knives. They whistle along the edges of passageways, slip through stone, and nobody knows where they expire or who keeps tally of the honor of thieves.

NOTE: Those seeking a plan of Eastern State Penitentiary can find one here.

The Green Cell

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: Prisons provide a path to redemption. A penitentiery is a special kind of prison designed for the penitence and reform of the prisoner. Here the prescribed treatment for lasting and deep contrition was prolonged, solitary confinement.

Cell Block Seven

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: Prisons are ministers of punishment. They seek to console society and its victims by making those who caused suffering to suffer.

The Hub

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: Prisons may keep us safe or terrorize us, but they are always about control.

Orbits

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: In prison, the wings of imagination are borne on the winds of escape, but waiting is the endless orbit of doing time.

Cell Block Twelve, Floor Three

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: Imprisonment is antithetical to freedom. Prisons measure the failure of a society to be free. Their walls are scarred with that failure.

From Outside Cell Block Eight

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: We go to abandoned buildings to feel the past resonate in the present and to find out who we have become. The reverberations of an abandoned prison echo differently than other buildings. When a home, a hospital, a school, or a factory is abandoned it is usually a loss for a community with deep memories invested there. However, when a prison closes few mourn its passing, there is little nostalgia, and the memories are dispersed. Although the symbolism of prison is fundamental to society, most of us know prisons only from the outside and at a very great distance.

Guards' Window

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: I've been to The Pen. This is the place that originated the word, "penitentiary." I'm happy to say my trip was recreational. It makes a cosmos of difference. You can read about Eastern State Penitentiary here.

Moloch

WILLIAM PAPE, Waterbury, 1918: "Our industries might be gathered into the grasp of giant corporations whose controlling spirits, destitute alike of local affiliations and decency of sentiment, would cold-bloodedly close down many factories on the ground that Waterbury was not a logical site for an industry."

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: These turbines stand at the head of the factory shed where American Copper & Brass made pipe. The Naugatuck River, thirty of forty feet beyond the back wall, drove these turbines which animated machines the size of railroad cars and men by the train-load. The river has been unplugged. The trains are gone.

Factory Landscape

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: Interstate 84 heading east leaps from the western bluff of the Naugatuck Valley, and motorists find themselves looking down across the City of Waterbury from the top deck of a gangling, graceless structure known as, "the mixmaster," that spans the valley and connects I-84 with the city and the north-south highway.

Waterbury sits approximately half way up the Naugatuck Valley. It is the land of many rivers where the valley spreads out. It has always been too wet and rocky to farm, but mosquitos thrive. The local tribes called it Mattatuck, the land without trees, and wondered why white men would want to live there. The settlers called it, "Waterbury," and built mills on the rivers to manufacture buttons.

Through this window in the stair tower of an empty factory you could have watched Waterbury grow. Although the French Gothic towers and spires of St. Anne's and the French-Canadian community it served were probably there first, workers, some among them French-Canadian, probably stopped at this window to listen to the bells peal at the topping off ceremony when the dome was completed and the sanctuary finally occupied. That was shortly after World War I. It was the sort of day one might not even notice the smog.

Workers also probably stopped here around the start of World War II, when the smog was worse, to watch glaziers finish the shed roof over the pioneering, seamless pipe, production line going into service beneath. Some of them may have been baptized at St. Anne's, a church built with their parents' and grandparents' scrimped pennies.

French-Canadians were still working here in the 1950s when the new, double-barrelled, limited access "Route 8" carved its way up the valley, and in 1955 it's possible that workers entered here to salvage valuable equipment and documents from the factory as the city flooded and the copper tube production line was all under water. There's a sign in the shed to mark how high the water rose.

There were already fewer French-Canadians watching in 1971 when St. Anne's caught fire for the first time. It's said that after Interstate 84 set it's big footprints across the city, Waterbury was never quite the same, though at the time (1967) they envisioned a new city of gleaming, brass-trimmed towers.

The skies over Waterbury are clearer now. To those who drive Interstate 84 frequently, the spires of St. Anne's Church, shown here, the tall, slender tower of Union Station, and Holyland's cross on top of the eastern bluff of the Valley are familiar landmarks. Unless traffic is snarled, motorists have a two minute window on Waterbury and then it's gone. It's almost the blink of an eye.

Brass Mill Extrusion Press

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: When one steps into the past the air should be chalky and the sound disjunct, but here the wheels are still oiled and turning, and the steam is still hissing and purring softly. I watched a man hoist 20 foot lengths of copper tubing out of a bath of hydrochloric acid, the liquid cascading from the far end back into a long tub beneath. The bundle of tubes was then carried out of sight on a giant crane that straddled the building.

The enertia of great wheels keeps them spinning slowly, long after all other wheels have ceased. So it is here where a small amount of large diameter copper tubing is still made using technology put in place during World War II. No trains run here now, and only a few men work the floor. Beyond are other buildings of the complex, silent but for the haunting of pigeons, but its appropriate to start here where the music still plays in what is, as it were, a grand ballroom of another era.

The Naugatuck Line No. 2

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:  

Train Departing

The past is a cacophonous tumult

a maelstrom of melodies

some singing

some wailing

some marching defiantly. 

A railroad coach abandoned half way up the Naugatuck Valley

it's ruined upholstery, a nesting place for rodents and small birds

the meaning of the train

the track

the valley 

whiplash through time 

factory gears flash

amassing brassy fortunes

sparking dreams

winning wars

grinding lives to ash

populating suburbs with 2-car families. 

If not quite music, may it be chaos akin to the orchestra tuning up!

The black track along the river, where does it come from, where does it lead?

On the side of the coach a swastika has been spray-painted, an ancient tune. 

Who put it there and when? How does it reverberate out of the valley's past? How does it partake of the Valley's bigotries and rivalries, its compromises and its compassion?  Or is it the scornful howl of those who have come unhinged from history, beside the walls of Bedlam while the rest of us try to remember the past.

The Naugatuck Line

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:

Next Stop High Rock Grove, 1876

The train is sidetracked, loitering, killing time while the rails rust. They say the conductor died, but I've heard his voice, the conductor who became Superintendent of the Railroad and spoke with quiet authority.

"Tickets, fifty cents. Children under 12 half price. Leaving the station at 9 AM, please deposit lunch baskets in the special baggage car provided at the rear of the train, and watch your step. Proceeds will help support the Poor Children's Excursion Fund. Ten minutes to board"

The black track that runs along the river leads back in time 'til we near the hiss of steam and the whistle's white shriek, and we pass the surging hum of production for two World Wars. When we pass Seymour remember to look for the old natural falls and the channel they built there before the highway climbed over it.

"All aboard the Brass Valley Special with stops in Shelton, Birmingham, Ansonia Station, Seymour, Beacon Falls, and final destination, High Rock Grove."

That's where railroad superintendent, George W. Beach, has built a people's park at that point in the river where the hills narrow to a gorge. It's a cool spot in the shadow of the valley, a cool spot above Beacon Falls Dam, a quiet spot where the dam channels the water to make rubber shoes and woolen shawls and bronze piano-panels and leather belting and laces. We're near High Rock Grove when we see Rock Rimmon, like a plug in the valley, 400 feet high, but the train slips through, and as we slide back in time you may catch the strains of the Home Woolen Band riding on the wind from their daily noontime concert, but as we slip over the centennial the band fades and the mill's making rubber shoes.

"Beacon Falls; All aboard!"

Beacon Falls that brought fire to America with the first strike anywhere matches had been a flickering light, sometimes abandoned, but as we near our destination it is thriving and has recently been incorporated. We're almost there. Above the dam the river narrows to a deep defile, pauses so young men flaunting mutton chops can row on still waters as women recline in the backs of boats under mushroomy parasols.

"High Rock Grove, last stop."

A simple platform tames the wilderness and the letters "HRG," spelled in floral planting and children's laughter. We follow the music of the Thomas Full Orchestra to a grand pavilion and a shady grove where we spread blankets, picnic, and play croquet. There's skating at the rink to the Wheeler and Wilson Band, and Mr. Marsh our gentlemanly caterer furnishes refreshments at reasonable rates.

"Joy and gladness is the order of the day."

We follow trails deep into Sherman's Gorge, a precipitous course, past thick-thighed cataracts, dark pools, and mossy caves to where the world still grows wild, and adventures might yet be (though the indians have gone), until we arrive atop Lookout Point where some think the Indian Toby fell to his death, and a grand pavillion rises above the hills so our eyes can follow the full arc of the day.

At the opening celebrations even the well-heeled from Winsted have come in coaches down the rails to mix with the recently scrubbed, and occasionally since on the 4th of July.

At the Naugatuck Railroad's peak one could catch several trains daily to Bridgeport and New York City, but High Rock Grove was a favorite stop for families and especially children. Today a new commuter service as far up as Waterbury struggles to grow, the grove is now a forest and the High Rock, a hash of graffiti and shredded American flags, the trails are untended, but magical transports like this lie on idle sidings along the partially abandoned line.

When the trains pass down the black track, where do they lead. Can we still count the ties to yesterday and find the valley as it was when George Beach built the pavillion atop High Rock with the park at its feet, a new parthenon for picnics and parasols and rowing behind the dam?

The Hook

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL, "Farrel":

I've been shooting recently at what's left of the old Farrel works in Ansonia. In 1848, the year the railroad went into operation, Almon Farrel, who had engineered construction of Ansonia and the Ansonia Canal for Anson Phelps, went out on his own. He founded Almon Farrel & Company to manufacture things for manufacturing and to supply heavy machinery to manufacturers throughout the Naugatuck Valley. By the 1850s Farrel also had a factory in Waterbury.

At the time Charles Goodyear had recently patented his process using sulphor to harden rubber and called it, "vulcanization." His brother Henry Goodyear had built a rubber factory upstream in Naugatuck, the town that eventually made Naugahyde. Charles Goodyear famously died penniless (You can read about him here.) but vulcanization made rubber useful for seals, shoes, tires, gaskets, elastic bands, bumpers and balloons. It was the first, plastic "plastic." It fired imaginations, changed how simple things were done, provided much work and added a robust, sulfurous mix of seasonings to the Naugatuck River brew.

Both Birmingham Corporation and Farrel Corporation began manufacturing the equipment to manufacture rubber, and the entire Naugatuck Valley was becoming a powerhouse of industry in time for the Civil War.

In the 1870s under Almon's son Franklin Farrel, Farrel Corporation began manufacturing machines for grinding sugar cane. A single machine filled 80 freight cars on its way down to Bridgeport where it filled an entire ship bound for Cuba, and Franklin Farrel bought sugar estates in Santo Domingo and Cuba as inexpensive sugar became available to the middle classes in the U.S., and uprisings were managed in the Caribbean and, especially in 1919 and 1920, at home. During both World Wars Farrel works was running round-the-clock shifts.

The Farrel Corporation long ago merged with the Anson Phelps copper and brass works and with the old Birmingham Foundry. On May 6, 1981, Franklin Farrel IV resigned as assistant secretary of the Farrel Machinery Group ending family participation in the business. Today Farrel has offices in more than 30 countries, but the worldwide headquarters and the old hook in this photograph are still in Ansonia.

Lift

FRANK PACHRON: "When I was in high school, they gave me a tour of the brass mill, and they said, 'This is your college.'"
(from Brass Valley by Jeremy Brecher, Jerry Lombardi, and Jan Stackhouse)

Between Wings

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:

Death Rattle

Like an empty tarmac, 

the work floor lies,

a broken promise.

Windows covered 

in corrugated tin 

rattle like machine gun fire

in a distant bay,

chatter nearby, 

but there are no machines, 

no fire,

only two column lines 

to carry 

the stacked 

load 

under production

and beyond the din.

Factory Stair, Torrington

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: The 1845 potato famine in Ireland coincided with the building of the railroad up the Naugatuck Valley, and so it was hungry and mostly illiterate, unskilled men with brogues who leveled the roadbed and laid the track along the river all the way to Winsted. Completed in 1848, it opened the valley to industry and carried the products of those industries to Bridgeport and the world. Trains brought coal, copper, zinc, tin, jobs and cheap labor and took away buttons and kettles, pins and pipes, clips and clocks. Brass was the plastic of its time; uses were burgeoning, and the Naugatuck Valley was competing with Birmingham, England, to be the brass-making center of the world.

How can I touch those struggles in the crumbling brick and rusting ducts that remain of this industrial empire? Where can my camera catch reflections of the imaginations fired by new engineering challenges and devising machines, procedures and new metallurgy to make things faster, better, cheaper? Where do the halls still echo the machinists' practiced craft and confidence? Where does the floor still creak from the daily passage of unskilled, buggy-luggers and grunts working 12-hour days and six day weeks or sometimes not working at all? Can photographs get near any of these?

Output at the mills fluctuated but industry boomed during the Civil War, and after the war the rest of us came and the Valley began to fill up. The trains brought Italians, and Lithuanians and Russians along with the coal and the copper and the tin. Like the Irish, many of us were illiterate and unskilled. In addition, we spoke no English.

Mill owners built villages to house us and systems to provide water and food, to keep the peace, and to manage town affairs. It was a massive undertaking to create civic institutions that would support the growing population. They hired prestigious designers like Cass Gilbert, McKim, Meade and White, Olmstead Bros. to design civic buildings and public spaces that would reflect the confidence of the region and provide a foundation of hallowed permanence. The policemen and firemen and the apprentices on the way up were mostly Irish, but we all formed clubs, gangs, factions and unions, and we were encouraged to back political candidates and vote. Banding in groups of our own kind, we struggled over identity, flexed muscle and sometimes rumbled.

Much of what the trains brought was pumped out into the Naugatuck or up into the air. It settled into everything, made the river smell and the air taste bad, and in Waterbury and Naugatuck people with money lived upwind, west of its stench. In Derby, whenever we passed the Hull Dye Works our children guessed at the river's color that day, but we worked hard and raised families as best we could. Those who worked at the pickle tubs got metal fume fever and called it spelters' shakes, and rollers lost arms, but workers with experience argued over the best cures - whether oatmeal or hot cider and pepper cured Spelters' Shakes better and warned us about how much of our arm we'd lose on each machine.

During the Great War there were plenty of jobs, 24 hours a day, and after the war there were strikes and violence in the Valley and in 1920 the National Guard was called in. There was bloodshed, and some were called subversives, but the mills kept growing, and some of us became foremen.

In the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, D.C. are prototype models of many of the machines that operated in these factories. There are thousands of them. They look like sophisticated toys, but they actually run. What's left today in these hollow spaces where the actual machines ran? What memories echo here? One must listen closely to hear the past behind the sound of the river and the wind.

High Iron No.2, On the Bridge at Shelton

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL, "Wolcottville Brass and Battery": 

They claim it was all about buttons, mostly brass ones. I picture retired colonels from the recently won Revolution wanting something a bit spiffier than they wore at Valley Forge and chagrined to realize the best brass buttons came from Birmingham, England.  However, think of what you're wearing and imagine removing every button, clip, or fastener, every bit of elastic, every buckle, zipper or inch of velcro tape. Take off your suspenders. Now think about how you're going to hold your clothing on, and appreciate the importance of victory.

Button making had been a cottage industry in the U.S., a sideline for some farm blacksmiths especially in the Naugatuck Valley. If the a farmer-blacksmith didn't peddle his wares door to door, he paid a peddler who traveled a broader area with a wagon full of goods. Brass smiths concentrated in the Naugatuck Valley formed companies and alliances. Sometimes companies merged. They established trade agreements, controlled prices, fixed market shares, developed sources for copper in the west, but in the 1830s their cottage industries couldn't satisfy the craze for economical, attractive, brass buttons the way English buttonmakers could.

Whatever drove the need for better American buttons, there were rumors of kidnappings and men smuggled out of Birmingham, England - English platers, rollers, die sinkers whisked away in the cover of darkness, sealed into barrels, brought to the Naugatuck Valley in the New World to work their alchemy.

A story passed down from those who were there may say more about the Yankee brassmasters' character. First, it wasn't only buttons for your trousers but kettles for the hearth. In 1834 all kettles were imported from Birmingham, England. That was the year Israel Coe a local farmer, John Hungerford a local merchant, and New York entrepreneur Anson G. Phelps became partners in Wolcottville Brass & Battery to manufacture American buttons and kettles. Phelps had purchased the site high up on the Naugatuck River in Wolcottville (now Torrington) where in 1813 Frederick Wolcott had built a woolen mill, attracted a large work force, and created demand for goods and services.

The process for manufacturing kettles was known as the battery process. Israel Holmes had a share in the business and was in charge of the manufacturing. He needed expertise and equipment for rolling the brass. The story is told in an old history of Waterbury:

Mr. Holmes went to England for the purpose of procuring machinery and workmen. His efforts in this respect were hindered by every possible ingenuity and power of those interested in the same kind of manufacturing in that country, but after a time he sent two battery men to Philadelphia, one of whom died the next day after his arrival. Subsequently he procured others and thirty-eight men, women and children in one vessel  arrived in New York. Considerable trouble was experienced in transporting them without a railroad to Wolcottville. When they were landed here, the mill was not ready for operatives, and thereby the troubles were multiplied.  The men received their pay and, having nothing to do, most of them gave themselves to dissipation and the disquietudes of disposition. In the meantime Mr. Pope [one of the skilled workers] bargained with other parties for a rival concern and took three of the men with him. This was at first thought to be an injury but eventuated an advantage as these men proved to be worthless in the business. However, some of the workmen remained, and the quick eye and ready hand of Wolcottville Yankees soon secured experts in the making of brass.

In any case, the battery process for making kettles was a loser for Wocottville Brass & Battery after Hiram W. Hayden invented a method for making brass kettles by spinning disks of sheet brass through a die. The brass-spinning process revolutionized the kettle-making industry.  What should be made of the observation that Hayden was working for Israel Holmes at Scovilles Mfg. in Waterbury when he made the discovery that disadvantaged Holmes work at Wolcottville Brass & Battery in Torrington?

As I've immersed myself in these old stories of the Valley, the entanglement of individuals and corporate entities seems to be a constantly fluctuating thing like the river itself, and the same Yankee names keep reappearing along the shores as owners and partners in different combinations through expansion & consolidation and new processes and new products and new dams, and as industries like clockmaking and cabinet hardware are spun off by the same brass families, and the Naugatuck Valley begins to fill up, and then the railroads come.

Back Office, Shelton, CT

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL, "Phelpsville": 

Sheldon Smith's Birmingham project was a success. By 1836 he had attracted a range of independently owned, small industries to the site including, a first-hand source tells us, "one factory for making sheet copper and copper wire; one for making augers; one for making carriage springs and axles; one for making nails or tacks; one for flannels and satinets, with some other minor manufacturing establishments." Omitted and most important was the presence of the Birmingham Foundry which manufactured machinery and equipment for using river water to power mills.

Other sources suggest the brass mill was owned by Smith and Phelps and built with their own capital. It was one of several in the valley where Phelps had invested.  Their millwright was Almon Farrel. Bigger dreams lay ahead, so it's unclear what made Sheldon Smith choose this moment to sell his interests and move on.

Phleps went on building. When expansion became difficult on the west side of the Naugatuck, Anson Phelps bought land on the east side to be called Phelpsville. In 1844 with Almon Farrel to engineer the new enterprise, Phelps began a new water project with a dam across the Naugatuck and a new company and in, not Phelpsville (there was already another Phelpsville in the region) but Ansonia.  Anson Phelps and his new company, Ansonia Brass and Battery eventually spun off Ansonia Clock Company. Clocks use lots of brass parts. He was also partners in a kettle factory in Wolcottsville (now Torrington) near the source of the Naugatuck. Phelps was investing widely.

However, Anson G. Phelps is remembered mostly as the the co-founder of Phelps-Dodge which became famous for it's copper and tin mining operations and, after being passed to a new generation, infamous in 1917 for imprisoning 1300, striking, Texas, mine workers in cattle cars and kidnapping them through the desert without food or water 200 miles to New Mexico where they were left and warned never to return.  You can read about the Bisbee Deportation here.

Anson Phelps lived in New York City and contributed heavily to The American Bible Association, overseas missionary organizations and to efforts to establish Liberia. In his will he left $5000 to each of his grandchildren with the injunction:

"I give and bequeath to each of my grand-children, living at my decease, the sum of $5,000, to be paid them as they severally attain the age of 21 years. This latter bequest I direct to be accompanied by my executors with this injunction:-That each of my said grand-children shall consider the said bequest as a sacred deposit, committed to their trust, to be invested by each grand-child, and the income derived therefrom to be devoted to spread the gospel, and to promote the Redeemer's kingdom oil earth, hoping and trusting that the God of Heaven will give to each of that wisdom which is from above, and incline them to be faithful stewards, and transmit the same to their descendants, to be sacredly devoted to the same object.

I know this bequest is absolute and places the amount so given beyond my control; but my earnest hope is that my wish may be regarded as I leave it, an obligation binding simply on their integrity and honor."

I am beginning to see more clearly the life of the early Valley and its emerging industrial shape, but who were these Yankees who mastered brass, and what exactly is their legacy?

Water Secrets

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL, "Smithville"

Sheldon Smith was also born in Derby, but he never got the fancy education at Yale. He never taught school or wrote poetry as did David Humphreys. Instead, after a basic education at the local schoolhouse, he apprenticed himself to a saddle and harness maker in Bridgeport and was eventually taken in as a partner. However, he had other dreams. In New York he met Anson G. Phelps an entrepreneur and former saddle maker who had been investing in copper and other minerals.

Smith went on to Newark, NJ, where he proved doubters wrong by envisioning and building a system bringing clean water to the city. What share he claimed in fostering utopian visions of society is unclear. What is clear is that he had a vision for water.

In the 1830s Sheldon Smith returned to his hometown, Derby, Connecticut, with a plan and a backer. Derby was in decline following the Revolution and in need of revitalization. Smith, who had bought the old grist mill, envisioned, "Smithville," and went to work. He and his New York City friend, Anson Phelps, laid out the streets and built housing to create what is today downtown Derby. They also built the reservoir, and channeled the Naugatuck River through a mile and a half canal system to power a considerable industrial village.

In the end the name that was chosen was not Smithville but Birmingham after the center of England's great copper and brass industry.

You can view an engraving of Birmingham, Connecticut in 1836 here. Sheldon Smith's home is the one at the top of the hill on the left.

Through Glass Darkly

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL, "Humphreysville"  

Previously called Chusetown, in 1804 the legislature designated the area by Rimmon Falls, four miles upstream of Derby on the Naugatuck as "Humphreysville." By then, David Humphreys was raising sheep. Born in Derby and educated at Yale, he had been a trusted aid, friend, and confidant of George Washington during and after the Revolution. He was honored for his bravery at Yorktown and chosen to receive the enemy's colors at the surrender of Cornwallis and convey them to Congress in session in Philadelphia. 

For a hundred years before the revolution the towns had employed local sheepmasters to oversee the breeding of sheep and the duties of the town shepherd, but yield and quality remained low. After the revolution Humphreys served for six years as our first ambassador in Spain and Portugal securing treaties. After Jefferson recalled him, and he finally disembarked at Derby Landing from his travels in Europe, he was accompanied by 91 Merino sheep and had an extensive knowledge of the strengths and evils of English, woolen manufacturing.

In 1803 on the banks of the Naugatuck River beside Rimmon Falls Humphreys began laying out what has been called the first factory village in the United States. There, using the power of the Naugatuck, the wool of his Merino sheep was converted to woolen cloth.  Soon there were houses for workers, a grist mill, a paper mill, a clothier, and surrounded by gardens to produce food to feed a work force. There was also a school to educate the children and a four-story factory producing both woolen cloth and cotton cloth in quantities for export. Humphreys paid the schoolmaster's salary and offered prizes for scholarship and prizes for outstanding job performance by his laborers. He went before the state legislature to lobby for bills to enforce factory safety and cleanliness. When Madison took his oath of office in 1809, he was dressed in a full suit of American woolens from Humphrey's Merino sheep, of which Colonel Humphreys's factory produced the coat.

Humphreys' was a utopian vision put into practice on the Naugatuck River when Chief Joseph still lived along its banks, and it's waters still contained fish. Today, the town is Seymour, and the falls and several blocks of the town lie beside concrete pillars and under the shadow of the Route 8 overpass. In the shadows by the falls are the remains of an old sluiceway, and several times each day you can hear the commuter train pass along the track nearby, but amid the merged din of highway and falls, little else tells of the industrial past of the Naugatuck here, and fish are back in the river again.

DAVID HUMPHREYS:

"Oh, might my guidance from the downs of Spain,
Lead a white flock across the western main;
Fam'd like the bark that bore the Argonaut,
Should be the vessel with the burden fraught!
Clad in the raiment my Merinos yield,
Like Cincinnatus fed from my own field;
Far from ambition, grandeur, care and strife
In sweet fruition of domestic life;
There would I pass with friends, beneath my trees,
What rests from public life, in letter'd ease."

Hopper's Moved On

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: The waters of the Housatonic had a different fate than those of the Naugatuck. In 1870 the Ousatonic Water Power Company, organized by Edward Shelton, great grandson of an early settler, built a dam just above the confluence and began generating electricity to power the factories and growing domestic needs. Eventually almost the entire Housatonic River where it flows in Connecticut was to be involved in the generation of electricity, and today the river is a series of dams and lakes as far north as New Milford.

And industry today has little need for any of the things the Naugatuck Valley provided. Local zoning, taxes, and labor most often determine where in the hills a manufacturer settles its presses and switches on its tin or block hanger.


REMINDER: This Friday, Saturday and Sunday will be the last days to see "Silage: Process in Process," at the White Silo Winery and Vineyard, (info above) On Sunday the Winery will also be holding their annual Asparagus Festival.

Naugatuck Spring

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: As happens so often in my wanderings, the tracks up the Naugatuck Valley lead into the past. The Naugatuck River flows into the Housatonic at Paugassett, the town now known as Derby. That was the top of the Housatonic River's tidewater and as far upstream as the old, ocean-going, cargo ships could reach. Early settlers praised the quiet beauty of the rivers' confluence and the richness of the fishing grounds there. They built a landing at the point between the rivers and built a double width road up from the shore and called the area, "Birmingham."

It was sheltered harbor, well upstream, and it became an early center of ship building and trade. Ships from Derby served much of the East Coast and as far away as the West Indies with local fish and produce. By 1730 there were major industrial mills operating not only in Birmingham (Derby) but on the eastern shore in the area that is today Ansonia and on the west in the area that is today Shelton. By the 1830s it was a hotbed of industrial innovation and a bustling manufacturing center producing cotton and woolen goods, paper, sheet metal, wire and anything in shaped metal from augers to pins.

Between the three settlements lay the valuable resources of the rivers' confluence and above them the energy of the Housatonic and Naugatuck headwaters. While the Housatonic River wanders the Naugatuck rises with unusual speed. It is the largest Connecticut river whose waters originate in the state. By 1849 the Naugatuck Railroad had mastered its inclines and narrow passes as far north as Winsted permitting water-powered manufacturing to thrive and providing new access to markets for farm goods produced inland. The building of the railroad brought Irish immigrants, and each successive wave of immigrants made productive lives there in both industry and agriculture.

High Iron

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:  Railroads, like vines, crawled up river valleys where factories were already planted - a confluence of opportunities. This valley is the Naugatuck, dotted with towns where many immigrants found work in Derby, Shelton, Ansonia, Seymour, Beacon Falls, Naugatuck, Waterbury and up into the hills to Thomaston and Torrington and WInsted and finally rural Norfolk, source of the river and early outpost of Yale University. I've lived near the Naugatuck Valley most of my life, sometimes shop in Torrington, but know far too little of its history and significance.

I know enough to know the history wasn't always pretty especially in the lower valley, that its decline to rustbelt came early and that it was made worse by massive flooding in 1955. I know also that the whole valley is one of the formative places of American industry, a powerhouse from pre-revolutionary times, and carcases of its growth and collapse are still often visible. In the lower valley the tissue of sprawl has had trouble healing over the shards of rusting tin and crumbling brick, even as environmental plans have had notable successes. There is an interesting article on the Naugatuck Valley here. For now, I'm following the tracks to see where they lead.