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Finding Brass Valley

A Place in Time that Has Almost Vanished

Thursday, June 13 at 11 AM

Stamford Senior Men’s Club
open to the public

First Presbyterian Church

1101 Bedford St, Stamford, CT

PHOTOGRAPHER’S JOURNAL: Last week, I realize, took us back to places Lazlo and I have been making photographs for a decade. Time feels like wind, but it is also rain and the sun’s regular stroke, and here a carpet of seedlings reaches to be a prairie. It’s a place to watch. Time blows with the seasons here but never stops. We follow tracks to see where they lead.

As we arrived here I realized I had the wrong lens and I would have to shoot this interior with the equivalent of a 100-400mm zoom, a telescope good for birding, but not my usual choice for interiors. It was a chance to see differently. I may try it again.

Across the Naugatuck

NEXT SLIDE-TALK

Finding Brass Valley

A Place in Time that Has Almost Vanished

June 13 at 11 AM

Stamford Senior Men’s Club
open to the public

First Presbyterian Church

1101 Bedford St, Stamford, CT

PHOTOGRAPHER’S JOURNAL: The settlers who came to this place in 1642, used the Native American name, “Paugasset” to refer to the trading post they established there, on the east side of the Naugatuck & Housatonic Rivers' confluence. It was as far inland as ship’s could sail, a valuable port and place of shelter in time of storms. It was incorporated as the township of Derby in 1675. In the 1830s, here on the West side of the Naugatuck, near the point where two rivers meet, Anson Phelps, a metals merchant, and Sheldon Smith, a business man, collaborated to build a reservoir and canal to power a large factory village which they called “Birmingham,” after Birmingham England, the center of world brass-making at the time. It would make Derby one of the three founding cities of Connecticut's "Brass Valley."

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