Anatomy Lesson

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:  I was back at the foundry again yesterday, hoping to get a shot of the the billets just after they rise out of the pit in which they are formed, glowing like the monoliths in 2001. What I found instead was that the furnace was still shut down, scattered in pieces and unrecognizable to me. However Mike's and Willy's coaching a few days earlier had taught me at least to find the molds. You can see them here; one is behind the broom handle, a quarter of the way down (Click the picture to enlarge it). The other is just to the left of the first.

When the furnace is shut down, the men who regularly run the foundry, work on refitting and repairing it, and as always Mike was happy to show me around.  There were other men there too, engineering staff with the tools to install and test new hydraulics and gas lines and electrical circuits. There is no repair man to call on equipment like this, no single book from which to order the replacement part; what breaks, you fix, what fails, you remake. When conditions change, you innovate. 

Unfortunately, much of their work on the furnace happened in tight spaces and was not visually interesting, so I went off and explored other parts of the campus. I'm told that once, 3000 people worked here. In the foundry alone they said there were 8 large furnaces and many smaller ones. Other shops on the campus processed the new metal from the foundry into wire and rods. In my explorations I passed through what must have been the main engineering shop, row after long row of immense tools and benches, bits and chucks and widgets all in neat, graduated rows, enough to keep at least 100 engineers busy repairing, sharpening, building new. Several hours later I returned to the foundry and the lone furnace, last piece of equipment in operation on the campus.

While I was gone the crew had remounted the crucible on the new hydraulics they had been installing, and the hydraulics were extended, tipping the crucible steeply. It seemed the perfect shot to explain the anatomy of the furnace. In front of the crucible and looking a bit like two fire hydrants, are the plugs (perhaps one of the men will tell me if there is a better term) which close the bottom of the billet molds. The plugs have been raised high, more hydraulics refitted there. 

When I was back at the factory today they were relining the runner box with some sort of material like clay, and they were testing gas lines to the furnace blast. Flames were coming out of the leveled crucible, a picture I missed. They expect to start it up on Tuesday. Before the furnace can be put into operation, the hood will be refitted over the furnace (as shown here). Then the large cover which holds the molds will pivot on the track, back over the plugs, and the plugs will rise into the bottom of the molds. 

The metal tipped from the crucible flows through the runner box to the distributer cups above the molds. As the copper cools, the founder lowers the plugs, and the solid end of the billet drops down and becomes the new plug. Then he tips the crucible to send more fluid metal flowing toward the molds.

I thought about the small cohort of people who were repairing and maintaining this lone furnace, the genius they shared, the bonds they developed, a culture; then I multiplied that many times as it was when the Valley was filled with factories, and families whose children rose through the mills.  Then I thought about the dark sheds around me here, not the empty benches and idle tools, but the culture that had vanished, engine of initiative and innovation. How do we renew that culture, refuel that engine here, where everything is disposable and wealth is digital and what we need comes from somewhere else?

At the Crucible

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: The casting shop is a place of Stygian magnificence. Although the end of the shed is open to fresh air and daylight, inside the air is viscous and sooty, and one sees as if through cataracts into a tarred and dusted world that sucks up light and then suddenly sparkles and flares. Yesterday's image was shot here shortly after a truckload of scrap had been delivered. Along the edges of darkness they stacked gleaming bricks of discarded copper wire pressed tight the way unwanted cars are pressed tight at the auto junkyard. Wherever light caught the edges of the bricks they lit up like treasure chests.

The shed is extensive and lofty, and daylight glares from points on the far perimeter. It is strewn with dinosaurs of the brass industry's past, conveyors and compressors, tanks, pipes, and ducts, strange engines the size of cabins, rusted relics. Most appear to be in ruins, but along the back wall, as if from a great cave, this giant crucible still roars and glows. As Mike pushes a button the crucible tips, and molten copper flows into two molds. The molds are hard to make out as they drop into a pit below floor level where they are bathed in luminous water. It takes a long time for the molds to fill, but once they are loaded and gently cooled, Mike will hoist out two pillars of copper, fatter than telephone poles and glowing red.

The casting shed is a nasty place for taking pictures, with both too little and too much light. I put on my fastest lens, stop it all the way open, turn the ISO up to 1600 and try to squeeze out acceptable exposures at 1/80th of a second while dodging lens flare. I can't see to focus, and at f/1.8 focus should be precise. Sometimes I have trouble seeing the compositions through the viewfinder, and as I work my hands and gear turn black and buttery. It is a nasty place for taking pictures, and I keep going back for more.

Mike

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:  I was back at the foundry again on Wednesday as I have been on and off with no notice in this journal. Immediately I was told there had been layoffs here and at the manufacturing plant in Waterbury. I had heard earlier that they had been hit hard by the sequester, that the work that had been done to bring in new contracts by adding a new alloy might be all undone by the stalemate in Washington. At least those were the rumors among the men.

Most of the men shrugged. A few said it was a good time of year to have some time off, but nobody knew if this was time off or time over - the last brass poured in Brass Valley. In any case, it was too immediate, too personal for anyone to think it might be the end of an epoch. Two billets were cast on Wednesday, and they told me the last two billets would be cast and pulled at 9:30 the next morning, Thursday. I was there, and it proved interesting in that the billets needed to be longer than usual.

I described the unusual manner of pouring the billets into rings rather than molds in an earlier post (http://rothphotos.blogspot.com/search?q=molds).  The usual manner of removing the  billets is to lower them beneath the rings and swing the assembly holding the rings to the side.  This time the billets were too long to lower beneath the rings so instead, they were cooled to shrink and then, first pushed up a couple of feet through the ring far enough to get a chain on the end so the crane could lift each one up the rest of the way through the ring.  A three-ton, singeing-hot billet dangling from a crane always looks precarious, but these were yanked up extra high in the rafters, and the chain was very close to the end of each billet.  

There's a moment in this process that I'm always ready for and always surprised by. It is when the billet passes by, and I feel the immense wave of heat radiating from it; how easily it might slip! I'm always ready with an escape route, and I'm always surprised by how hot it is and must stop myself from pulling back and losing the shot.  That this billet was gray rather than orange did not make it feel any cooler.  That made it even more surprising.

The billets cast on Wednesday and Thursday will be trucked to Waterbury for processing while the factory in Ansonia goes idle and in Washington, D.C., Congress claims to know how to create jobs but remains deadlocked and goes on vacation. On Thursday morning, March 28, 2013, two extra long billets were cast. May they not be the last.

Raking the Runner Box

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:  The runner box is a heavy, steel channel in the form of a "T." When set in place on the furnace, the base of the "T" catches the pour which flows along the channel to the two tips at the top of the "T."  From there the metal flows through holes on the bottom of the channel into two distributer cups that help to spread the metal flowing down into the molds so no air pockets develop. 

The channel is lined with insulating cement, and before the pour begins it is covered in a layer of charcoal.  As the hot metal flows over the charcoal, the charcoal burns to keep the metal from losing heat while flowing to the molds.  Periodically Mike rakes out the channel in the runner box to keep cooling metal from clogging the channel.

The Founder

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: Google Earth reveals dozens of factory sheds along the river at the foot of what was once called, "Brass Valley." The foundry takes up a portion of one shed. It is probably the last major piece of the old technology still running anywhere on the rusty campus.

On the day I took this picture the temperature outside was pushing toward 100 degrees, and it was considerably hotter inside the foundry. The normally waxy air was pudding. I can only imagine what it was like at the console beside the furnace where Mike works all day. Except when the billets are pulled from the form, he generally works alone. The console lets him monitor the all-important temperature of the brew, control the melt and tip the crucible to set the correct flow. The copper must be poured slowly, and the molds are large, so much of his time is spent waiting beside the furnace. Periodically he rakes out the channel through which the molten copper is flowing, and the rake showers him in sparks. However, most of the action comes at the end of the process, when the billets are hoisted by crane from the molds and the furnace is reset and charged for the next pour.

As Mike went on break between pours, I tried to catch a casual shot of him with the foundry behind, but when he saw the camera he stopped and posed proudly.

Farrel Foundry: Imperial Basilica

PHOTOGRAPHER’S JOURNAL: Farrel Works feels like a giant cathedral. Or rather it is a half dozen giant cathedrals set side by side, some end to end. Stand anywhere, and the space you are in is a basilica echoed by side aisles on one side or both and reverberating on into shadow. Trusses soar like tracery and end either in stained and broken glass skylights, or along rusted stair rails with checkerboard shadows and catwalks between ducts and stacks into darkness. Suites of chambers are apparently carved inside of walls between buildings and sometimes into bedrock. Beneath, the foundry is tunneled with catacombs that wind past open wells where molds were set for casting. One needs a flashlight to find the way from well to well and out to air and sunlight. There are places, beyond locked doors and across catwalks too frail for cats, that may never reveal their secrets. 

Almon Farrel, son of a Waterbury millwright, built Ansonia and pioneered in the manufacturing the tools used for large scale manufacturing. This was the foundry that produced large machinery for making paper and rubber and for grinding sugar cane. Of all spaces of Farrel Works, none is as grand and exalted as the nave of Farrel Foundry. Is it Connecticut’s greatest surviving cathedral of industry? It deserves the title: Imperial Basilica. Whether there is anything of it that can be preserved other than memories, I have no idea.

Removing the Distributer Cups

On Exhibition Now & Throughout March

Six Images from the Casting House

photographic images by Emery Roth

slide-talk: March 10 at 6 PM

Silas Bronson Library

267 Grand Street

Waterbury, Connecticut

PHOTOGRAPHER’S JOURNAL:  The distributer cups break the single flow of metal into small streams, as it flows into the molds, so that bubbles don’t form. They must be removed before the freshly poured billets can be pulled and set to cool. The last casting furnace stopped in December, 2013. The large prints in this exhibit try to capture the moods of the casting house in its last three years. It was at once one of the most beautiful and dirtiest places I've ever been.

Transept

Half way down the “nave” of the Farrel Foundry is the transept. That is where the metal was poured into molds made of sand. Workers associated in any way with the Farrel foundry usually have stories to tell. Grime, danger, and heroism seem to be widely remembered, and there is a special regard given those who poured the metal. Founders, casters and molders are the priesthood of the metals and machine industries. Once theywere alchemists whose coveted secrets imparted the spirit to the metal and on whose crystal magic all future success depended. 

In 1731 quality iron ore was discovered in Salisbury, CT, and by the mid-1740s they were producing pig iron in East Canaan, Salisbury, Sharon and Kent, and the Northwest HIlls had become the center of America's iron industry. By the time of the Revolution there was hardly a community in the region that had the power of a good stream that did not also have a puddling furnace for refining the impurities from the pig iron produced in blast furnaces. Local farmers forged the purified wrought iron into the tools they needed, and the region developed an expertise in metal working. But forging and founding were different arts, and the most precious secrets belonged to those who poured the metal.

With ores and metals of uncertain purity and the fluctuating heat of charcoal, coke or, later, coal, they learned to make fires that would sustain the high heat required and relied on their senses, knew by the sound or smell, when it was time to add ingredients or mix or pour. The region developed an experimental curiosity about making and working metal that grew to expertise and drew the metals industries to the Naugatuck Valley and to Connecticut.

I’ve been told that existing journals of Barnum & Richardson, with furnaces in East Canaan and Salisbury show deliveries of iron to the Farrel foundry right up through WWI and deliveries still being made as late as 1925, two years after the smelting operations had shut down. The last delivery of Connecticut iron came in 1941, exclusively made up of old pieces of salamanders probably for a widening Second World War. The superintendent who kept those journals was reportedly, "proud that ‘Salisbury' iron had served the country from the Revolution through WWII. 

The people of the Lower Valley are also quick to talk about Farrel’s past importance to the nation’s defenses, and I’ve been told the foundry was hidden in camouflage during WWII. Pigs of iron, whatever the source, were delivered here, to the transept, where the metal was poured.

Control Booth

PHOTOGRAPHER’S JOURNAL: I suppose it could be anything now, the cab of a tractor or the booth from the shamed TV show, The $64,000 Question, but it is perched above a pit where I believe giant machine parts were once cast. 

How long does it take for darkness to sink into a thing and the hum of life to subside? Who still remembers what it felt like to stand here and run these controls that managed the flesh-searing liquid metal that splattered from the molds with only a bit of glass and wire screening to defend against the heat and stink. The machine parts made here required cranes that carry 40-ton loads. It has been at least a quarter century since anyone sat here, and the foundry behind is stacked with the flotsam and jetsam of factories everywhere closed or failed.

I find pleasure here in the various ways light and color are filtered and reflected and changed. The soft colors refused all my attempts to brighten and clarify lest I disturb time's dust.

Be sure to double click the image to get the feel of standing inside. Full resolution images clearly show the weave of the various levels of wire screen.

Imagine

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: The Naugatuck Rail Line, that runs in an alley through the middle of this site, is temporarily closed as a new roadbed and track are laid. What is to become of these vacant buildings and this site?

From the roof of the old American Brass office building one can see into the past. Could the past help us imagine a future here? Those who know Ansonia know the two stacks lie along the east “bank" of the Naugatuck River, though all banks vanished after the 1955 flood when high, concrete walls were built to contain the river that had flooded. Surrounding the stacks are filters, ducts, ladders and catwalks that are giant industrial river sculpture when viewed from the hills on the western side of the river.

Through a gap, just visible at the end of the long building with the skylights, an ancient factory road crosses toward the river between what were once two of Brass Valley’s founding brass companies. On this side was the Wallace & Sons Brass Company. The long building may be the oldest on the site and appears in the 1884 Sanborn maps of Ansonia, though it may go back much further. The map shows things of concern to insurers, like 3 steam boilers, marked 600 HP, that were then in the middle of the long building, and the map reveals how many night watchman visited the wood piles. The northern half of the building (probably initially two buildings) is marked, “Tumbling Bbl’s.” We can trace its future functions in later maps.

The factory road that crosses the site drops steeply where it disappears between the sheds and toward the river, and all the buildings that appear to be one story are, in fact, two tall stories. In the deep space below one can still see original stone work and a stone arch that marks where an old tunnel passed beneath the cross-road and connected the two sites. 

The 1884 map identifies the property on the far side of the crossroad as being a rolling mill of the Ansonia Brass and Copper Company. A.B.&C. was the creation of Anson Phelps who created Ansonia, originally to be called Phelpsville. Further back in the picture is a large, triangular, red, brick gable. It is end wall of the legendary Ferrel Foundry. The 1890 Foundry was reputed to be the largest machine tool foundry in New England. The pastel rectangular wall marks the attic space where the forms for the giant Farrel sand molds were built and lowered to the foundry below. 

Beneath the pavement that crosses diagonally thru this picture the old Ansonia Canal is still flowing. Almon Farrel built the Ansonia Canal for Anson Phelps to power industry in his new industrial village. One can still see the canal, if one knows where to look. The future is made of imagination or accident. Can anyone imagine dining some day in restaurants in ancient brick shops along a restored Ansonia Canal. Or are there already too many vacant stores on Main Street? What futures might this site inspire?

Farrel Yard

PHOTOGRAPHER’S JOURNAL: A moment after it pulls away from the station platform in Ansonia, the northbound train on the Naugatuck line passes beneath the pedestrian bridge of Farrel Machine Company and enters the Farrel yard, where the bridge and buildings (all out of the picture on the left) are casting their shadows. The rear masonry stack marks the American Brass casting shop, where this series began, beside the river. The front masonry stack serves the old “dynamo room” and powerhouse (1911) of the Farrel Machine Company at its northern edge.

The previous two photographs in the series were taken from points on the track between the two bridges. The first faced north; the second faced south. Between those pictures and this lies the heart of the old Farrel Machine company. The two campuses taken together, Farrel and American Brass, are a unique, pre-flood survival, and local residents will be quick to remind visitors of the roles both played in WWII, but the truth is, they were important as far back as the Civil War.

Anyone with a bent for metal will be drawn to the sand elevator rising on the left, a corrugated tin giant with tin stairways and pipe-railings and balconies dangling treacherously from unreachable operation centers and offices high in the elevator tower. One can still trace the old track that ran below the elevator and into the long "coke and sand" storage shed. It first appears on the Ansonia maps in 1890, but the bridge from it doesn’t appear until 1895.

The bridge across the track is two stories high and enters the eastern sheds of Farrel near their midpoint. Half the length of the bridge is hidden in this picture. It continues an equal distance across the roofs of three rows of work sheds before reaching the giant foundry, perched a level higher on the hill. There, the sand was used to make molds for casting giant machine parts.The foundry was built between 1884 and 1890.  Once the old Ansonia Canal ran along the North Main Street edge of the Farrel Foundry, between the foundry and Main Street. 

Inside the three rows of sheds, a half dozen architectural styles, at least, tell of the incremental adaptations by which Farrel grew and changed. The first of these sheds appears on the 1900 map. At some point the pedestrian level of the bridge where it crossed the lower sheds was removed to allow for increased ceiling clearances in the sheds below. In another place an interior wall was once the fine masonry facade of the pre-1900 shed. 

Perhaps the most curious feature of the Farrel Yard is the rustic green, wooden structure that seems to upset the geometries of the place. It is not just a wall set a-kilter to shelter trains that once entered at the first opening; it is that a whole shed has been set at an angle that produces difficult to utilize corners where it bumps against the sheds of the  foundry section. A second large opening permits an old road to run beside the angled shed, as the road climbs the hill to Main Street. It’s not a surprise to discover much of this angled section and probably the green wooden facade were already in place on the 1884 map of Ansonia. These are the most ancient geometries that crept toward where the trains had been passing since 1849.

The Farrel Sand Elevator

PHOTOGRAPHER’S JOURNAL: Even before I wanted to know what it was, I imagined what it might be like up in those tin can offices with their rickety terraces and dangling stairs, and what treasures had been left moldering deep in the bowels of the beast? It is as much a relic of industry as of railroading and an archetype for model railroad enthusiasts to miniaturize. Some of the track remains in place that threaded the rail yard to carry trains through the opening under the elevator and into the long shed that stretched to the end of the property.

I didn’t know then that the bridge and tower dated at least to the start of World War I, nor had I yet discovered what was still up in the long passageway or how deeply it penetrated the rows of Farrel, work sheds to deliver sand from train cars to molds used by the foundry to make giant rubber and sugar calenders for which Farrel-Birmingham became famous. 

What does Connecticut want to remember from what’s left of Ansonia’s industrial heritage? What does future Connecticut need to know about those who came before? Should any part of this place be salvaged to help tell its story or provoke a question? 

I’m only a photographer, and my photographs are not meant to answer those questions, only to show the things that caught the camera-eye of one of time’s vagrants looking for shelter along the track. 

Arriving, Ansonia

PHOTOGRAPHER’S JOURNAL: I’ve stepped through the opening in the chain link fence in yesterday’s photo and turned 180 degrees to look down the rails the other way. 

The track passes under two bridges that unite multiple buildings of the Farrel Machine Company. Anson Phelps, who established the brass and copper mills that became American Brass in Ansonia (from whose property this picture is taken) hired millwright Almon Farrel to dig the mile-and-a-quarter canal that powered the industrial village that Anson Phelps named, "Ansonia.” Afterward, Farrel began his own mill in Anson Phelps’ Ansonia. About that time the railroad came through.

Through the chain link on the left can be read the name, “Farrel Birmingham.” The windows line the first of seven parallel rows of sheds where Farrel machinists cast and finished machine parts for some of the largest factory equipment of the 19th and 20th centuries. The high windows, that project over the track, lie just where the famous, “tunnel,” beneath Farrel work sheds emerges (a public right-of-way, I understand); the road runs on beside the track.

The near bridge is two stories high and connects the Farrel Foundry at the top of the hill to the tall, tin sand elevator (the most distinctive single "architectural" relic of Naugatuck Valley industry) and to the shed below where Farrel Foundry stored sand for molds. The bottom level of the bridge was for pedestrians. The top level is a crane-way for the crane that moved materials between the train siding and the foundry. The crane and much more is intact.

Near the back, the irrepressible Ansonia Opera House, an early work of Robert Wakeman Hill shows off its crisply detailed cornice. It is matched by an energetic facade on Main Street - a gem of a building! It is a relic of what Ansonia once was. Just beyond the Opera House the train arrives at the Ansonia station platform beside gray flood walls.

The Casting Shop

PHOTOGRAPHER’S JOURNAL: Dates on images indicate I’ve been coming here to shoot since 2011. Even then the Hendey casting shop was nothing but a pile of brick, rubble and a concrete base on which much of the plan of the building and the floor tiles of some of the rooms are still visible today. I walk from room to room though the walls are gone.

Though I’ve seen the pictures, it’s hard to imagine it whole again while standing here in the open yard between the wood pattern shop (yesterdays image) where the wooden molds for casting were made, and the buildings in the picture, where castings were finished and tested and assembled. By 1910 it would have been a tightly packed hub of intense industry with a tall stack and a staff of skilled toolmakers, machinists and engineers and apprentices and grunts and accountants and draughtsmen and bookkeepers and stenographers and secretaries and managers, and every day they all walked to work from houses nearby. Imagine.

Scraping the Runner Box

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: When in place, the runner box directs the liquid copper to the two distributer cups. Before the billets can be lifted from their molds, the runner box must be moved out of the way and scraped clear in readiness for the next pour. The sparks are real, the magic, Promethean.