Edge of the Stream

PHOTOGRAPHER’S JOURNAL: Before there was a Factory Hollow there was a Green on a hilltop and a meetinghouse, but even before those, to make a place habitable, settlers required a gristmill and a fulling mill and a sawmill, each along a nearby stream with a steady flow and a spot for a mill dam with a good fall and some hollows upstream dammed for the dry spell. 

Sprain Brook, along which Gideon Hollister, second of that name, settled, begins in the swampland below Davies Hollow, accumulates flow quickly near its head and follows a narrow valley for 6 to 8 miles south, where valleys merge out of the Northwest Hills. It was all engineered by the lumbering glaciers who, midway through the long valley, sent Sprain Brook through a meadow above which Gideon Hollister set a dam to channel Sprain Brook over the flutter wheel that kept his saw blade hopping 120 times per minute for 170 years. But Gideon Hollister was not the first to set his works in this spot. 

Where the valley widens to a meadow, beavers once dammed its flow and lived off the bounty of the stream, but there were no beavers when Hollister settled, thanks to those who didn’t settle but who traded the bounty of the beavers’ pelts with those who hunted and trapped them to the point of extinction, an event recorded in the diet of the native people and in a layer of sediment, many miles south under Long Island Sound. There, fifty years before Hollister settled, rich nutrients from the rotting debris of failing beaver colonies had made algae bloom and die. 

The same nutrients that made algae bloom in Long Island Sound made broad, flat meadows bloom in the fertile loam of vanished beaver works, near where Sprain Brook turned the Hollister mill wheel and up and down the valley in both directions and in the infinite hills beyond Sprain Brook.  

Such meadows brought settlers who could plant them quickly, but the settlers’ first crop was old-growth trees from the ageless forests which kept Gideon Hollister’s sawmill turning as long as Sprain Brook flowed and kept his potash works burning when it froze. Captain Hollister traded with his neighbors for their needs and his, and he fought beside them for their freedom.

When, in 1805, the turnpike followed the glacier through the long valley, the property with sawmill and water rights belonged to Gideon Hollister, third of that name, who probably appreciated the road's traffic of iron goods from the north and merchants from the south and an expanded region of neighbors and trade lubricated by reliable currency that flowed even to the colliers, smoking mounded timbers in the hills beyond the valley. 

And his son, fourth of that name, continued sawing lumber there for floorboards and headboards, cupboards and clapboards, posts, beams, shingles and shakes until he sold the mill in 1844 to 18-year-old Almon Galpin. Galpin restored it after Sprain Brook raged in the floods of 1853, taking out part of the dam and much of the valley. By then the endless forests were eighty percent gone, cut to the horizon, though Galpin would go on cutting through the Civil War until he sold the mill in 1876.

Edward Fenn was the next to own the flow of water, adding a forge and cabinet-making shop to the flutter of the mill and the chatter of the saw. It was said he could make anything out of wood, and he did so there for a half century until he retired, and the mill wheel stopped in 1926. 

Forests have returned around Sprain Brook and beyond, but the sheltering space beneath old growth canopy is gone forever and species of things we will never see, their passage marked where rich nutrients of the uprooted forest made algae bloom and die in the sediment under Long Island Sound as Sprain Brook sawed floorboards and barn boards, cradles and coffins that can still be found along the turnpike road.

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The mill was stabilized by Sidney and Beatrice Hessel and restored later by Jane Bentzen, Benedict Silverman and Steve Solley. 

Material for the above came from the following source:

“Why We Need Beavers” by Ben Goldfarb in “Connecticut Explored,” Spring, 2019

“An 18th Century Flutter Mill Reborn” by Frances Chamberlain, NYT Dec. 15, 1996

Stone By Stone, Robert M. Thorson, Walker & Co, NY, 2002

Empire Over The Dam, Kenneth T. Howell & Einar W. Carlson, Pequot Press, 1974

"An Inventory of Historic Engineering and Industrial Sites” Matthew Roth, Soc. for Industrial Archeology