Bridging Time

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: Turning the corner and continuing my stroll into the past (see previous entry), Anson Phelps’s Ansonia Brass & Copper once stood on the left. On the 1895 Sanborn map bold letters announce, “This building to be rebuilt at once.” Is it a sign of the big changes coming to the brass industry over the next decade? The three-gable profile of the unified space on the right that I knew as the Flat Wire Mill reveals its origin as three separate sheds. The three gables are pictured in the 1921 Ansonia aerial projection map, and on the 1906 Sanborn map, which is focused on roof construction, the three-gable elevation is drawn onto the plan of the three sheds. Except for those ancient structures behind the ivy-covered gable, Sanborn maps before 1906, show different buildings. The two new gables and their sheds must have been built between 1900 and 1906 which coincides with the consolidation of the brass industry in the Naugatuck Valley into what became known as, “The Big Three.” From within the building(s), the trusses of the two sheds seem of similar vintage.

The photo reveals one more survival from the past.The yellow pipe rail in the picture is attached to what looks like an I-beam half-buried in asphalt. The asphalt covers the old Ansonia Canal that Almon Farrel built for Anson Phelps. What looks like an I-beam helps carry the load across the canal.

Here, where the ancient factory road crosses toward the river through the middle of what would become the American Brass Co, workers arriving and leaving in shifts passed for more than a century. Before 1900 the maps show that when traffic crossed here then, it was over a "covered bridge.” In 1906 the Sanborn cartographers remove the roof graphic of the bridge and mark the passage over the canal, “steel bridge.”  The bridge in the picture used to have a marking indicating it was made by the Berlin Iron Bridge Company. Imagine all that has crossed this bridge since it was installed just after the start of the 20th century.