For me, the fire that destroyed it felt personal; Lazlo Gyorsok and I had made photographs there and in the adjacent tube mill until work ceased in December, 2013. I’ve told the story in words and pictures in Brass Valley: Fall of an American Industry (Schiffer Books, 2015). For me, the fire felt like a chapter of life closing, and the aftermath has felt like mourning.
Few today recall the distinguished role the building played in the evolution of Brass Valley. I share what I know of the Lampworks, in memoriam:
The ruins on Bank Street began life in 1880 as the new oil lamp factory of Holmes, Booth and Haydens. Israel Holmes was one of the patriarchs of the brass industry, and Hiram Hayden was one of its most creative minds. Holmes, Booth & Haydens was one of the two largest brass manufacturers that were consolidated (c.1905) to become American Brass Company, largest brass maker in the world.
The oil lamps made in the Lampworks lit rooms around the world, and much of the artful brass work and many of the intricate mechanisms were the designs of Hiram Hayden. He was an artist and a photographer and an inventor. Among his many patents was one of the first for making photographs on paper. He held more patents than anyone in Brass Valley. However, the machine he devised for forming kettles reflects his understanding of the liquid nature of brass, and it revolutionized the industry, putting brass batteries and their battered kettles out of business and capturing an international kettle market.
Israel Holmes was of a different temperament, and it would be interesting to understand their relationship. Holmes began life as a school teacher; an early writer called him “flamboyant.” He became known for his exploits in England obtaining the secrets needed to make brass in Waterbury and Torrington. English law made exporting men, equipment, or knowledge treasonous, and Israel Holmes traveled armed, at least once narrowly escaping capture. He later told of having men sealed into wine casks, loaded on ships and, as he told it, “spirited away" as cargo.
I don’t know when the Lampworks ceased making oil lamps, but by 1900 a small tube mill was operating in a building attached to the east end of the Lampworks, and a Victorian tower matching the one on the Lampworks unifed the design. This tower survives.
Machines added to thie tube mill in 1903 were still being used as late as 2013, and three, large, General Electric factory motors built in 1898 were still in place beside the tower until the mill finally closed. The tube mill was expanded and updated, under a sawtooth roof, in 1917 and at various times afterward, but it is not clear to me how use of the Lampworks building evolved.
By the time we began making photographs there, in 2011, only the first floor of The Lampworks was active. It was filled with powerful machine tools and served as the machine shop that kept the tube mill running sharp. Two stair towers provided access to floors above. The second, a shadowy, high space, was sparsely littered with gears and electrical boxes, an old scale and piled up, gray fluorescent fixtures. The floor above, however, was bright and carved into small rooms by vintage, glass office dividers through which light bounced in all directions, a suite of shadows shifting through the day. Beside it was a common area with an ancient "Graphotype" machine amid the rusting address plates of hundreds of Anaconda customers and contacts. In the attic above pigeons lived and died among things forgotten that were too far to fetch.
In the book are many photographs of the tube mill, the men and the machines in production, men using ancient tools to make specification-critical tube for nuclear submarines. These pictures are of the Lampworks in memoriam.
