In 1807 Eli Terry signed a contract with the Porter Brothers of Waterbury, CT, to produce 4000, wooden.\, shelf clocks in three years. Everyone said it was impossible. The best clock-makers would struggle to make a dozen clocks in a year. Terry met his obligation to make 4000 in three years for the Porters by developing the first mass production methods and machinery. Parts would be completely interchangeable without further filing and itting. Some consider Terry's accomplishment the most important step toward modern mass production.
Looking west down East Clay Street in Waterbury, Connecticut after a trip to HolyLandUSA, May, 2014 — The sun rising behind me catches Naugatuck River night fog behind the now demolished steeples of Saint Anne’s in Waterbury. St. Anne's, begun in 1906, was finally completed in 1922 by the French-Canadian community that settled in the area and worked in the brass mills. HolyLandUSA was the work of a Waterbury attorney. Today St. Anne's serves the local community with services in both English and Spanish.
Photographs of Connecticut's "Brass Valley," taken by Emery Roth before the brass mills closed. Above is a detail from "Made in the USA" showing Willy supervising furnaces of the last operating casting furnace of American Brass in Ansonia.
The last of the brass factories in the Naugatuck Valley shut down in 2013, but photographs I took in the mills from 2011 to 2013 preserve the last pours in the American Brass casting shop in Ansonia and the tube mill in Waterbury. A selection of these will be on included in an exhibition at the Whiteemore Library in Naugatuck through the month of November.
Also included in the exhibition are photos taken in the Farrel Machine Tool factories in Ansonia. The Farrel foundry was demolished this past summer. In the photo below Mike is about to remove freshly cast billets from the American Brass casting furnace in Ansonia.
Immediately after taking the photograph of the Farrel Foundry site on September 4th I walked around to this machine shop, still standing. It had paralleled and connected with the demolished Foundry. It looked no different from this picture taken a month before the Foundry demolition. I guess everything that could have been rattled loose by the demolition had already fallen.
The two rows of windows serve various offices and storage areas that were entered from the foundry. The upper row of windows span from the sand elevator in the north to a stair tower beside the" Tunnel" in the south. It contained a workshop and a long rabbit hole lined with shelves, parts to keep the busy factory running. The lower windows brought little light to a few dingy offices, still furnished and entered from the dark perimeter of the demolished foundry's floor. I imagine once they were busy.
Machine Monster #4 lived in a tube mill on Bank Street in Waterbury. The photos show the regal beast breathing fire when the mill was active (below) and then later after the mill closed (above). The tube being extruded was bound for use on the U.S. nuclear submarine. Those tubes are now manufactured in Mexico on some of the same machinery.
Meet
Oscar — He worked all his life in a Waterbury factory until the factory
was closed, abandoned, forgotten, and finally demolished this year.
At 1:30 today, as I returned from my hike, I again passed behind the nest on my way to the front door. Only one of the fledglings remained, and it was perched at the edge of the nest. It permitting me to take only two images and is now gone. So too are the many robins that have been "chirping" at the end of the day.
I first noticed the nest in the hanging fuchsia basket and the two tiny blue eggs inside it a few days ago, shortly after ignorantly watering all. The fuschia has suffered since, and today the nest had two tiny birds inside. The mother or father watches keenly from trees when I am out and about in the yard. I will let nature take its course, but they will have to get use to our passage or we are their prisoners.
June 10, 2023 — Early morning. a river of fog moving up the coast hangs on the mountains as it crosses the mouth of Somes Sound.
A short walk along the rocky shore from the house we recently stayed in is a point of land dividing Greening Bay from Southwest Harbor. Seated on a rock above the point I can look left across Greening Bay to the deep cleft where Acadian mountains divide, and water flows into the glacial loch that is Somes Sound. We climbed the mountains along the left edge of the opening and hiked along the ridge above Somes Sound. Looking right from my seat at the point the view is across the mouth Southwest Harbor and between islands to the open sea. It is still June and there is little traffic in or out of the harbor. The docks are loaded with lobster traps soon to be set.