PHOTOGRAPHER’S JOURNAL: When my journal was side tracked and broke off a week and a half ago, I was in the midst of telling about the ancient Black River Canal, now a dark mucky groove, lined crisply with massive rocks, that cleaves the earth’s crust with canal-lock stairways beneath a forest canopy lost to time. (http://rothphotos.blogspot.com/2015/05/flight-of-locks-black-river-canal-near.html).
Lyons Falls, New York is at the top of the stairway, at the confluence of the Black River and the Moose River, where there is a beautiful waterfall and a long dam. It was famous once for its "triple bridge that joined three shores with a junction over the water. Lyons Falls was a paper mill town whose vitality depended on the lumberman upstream and the seasonal supply of new logs that flowed on the river, and the dangerous work on the river was a sign of the town’s spunk.
The once thriving mill has become a wreck and a hazard and a constant reminder to a community on the brink, of a life that is gone. I arrived even as a crew of three, with cranes that wielded jack-hammers, chipped at a section of brick structure, as the rivers at this confluence idled and flowed.
