Shepaug River — Five Miles Below the Dam

Babbling Sky

Shepaug River Valley — River, Sky and Rock

Shepaug River Rapids

Shepaug River Valley, A few Miles Below the Dam

Shepaug Valley, East Wall

Following the River Road

Shepaug River Valley — Highway Railing

Shepaug River Valley 1

Little Pond, Nov. 8, 2024 — First Signs of Autumn

Spring is a world of dandelions soon to be seed balls.

 

 

Roots of Order

 

Shepaug Water, January 22, 2024

 

 

 

First Snow of the Season, January 7, 2024

 As viewed from a bedside window this morning.

First Congregational Church of Plymouth, CT. clock by Eli Terry, manufacturing pioneer

 
In 1807 Eli Terry signed a contract with the Porter Brothers of Waterbury, CT,  to produce 4000, wooden.\, shelf clocks in three years. Everyone said it was impossible. The best clock-makers would struggle to make a dozen clocks in a year. Terry met his obligation to make 4000 in three years for the Porters by developing the first mass production methods and machinery. Parts would be completely interchangeable without further filing and itting. Some consider Terry's accomplishment the most important step toward modern mass production.

Seth Thomas Clock Company, Thomaston, CT

Connecticut is the "clock state." Modern time was invented here when Eli Terry mass produced it, and it changed humankind forever. The Deco clock and tower of the Seth Thomas clock factory in Thomaston, CT, down the hill from Terryville, is one of the monuments to our transformation.

The story of Eli Terry, Seth Thomas and the beginning of mass production in America is well-told here: https://www.ctexplored.org/everymans-time-the-rise-and.../

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

St. Anne's, Waterbury #2: Looking east from Home Depot lot, April 8, 2014, toward HolyLandUSA.

 

St. Anne Catholic Church, Waterbury #1: Looking West from East Clay Street

Looking west down East Clay Street in Waterbury, Connecticut after a trip to HolyLandUSA, May, 2014 — The sun rising behind me catches Naugatuck River night fog behind the now demolished steeples of Saint Anne’s in Waterbury.  St. Anne's, begun in 1906, was finally completed in 1922 by the French-Canadian community that settled in the area and worked in the brass mills. HolyLandUSA was the work of a Waterbury attorney. Today St. Anne's serves the local community with services in both English and Spanish.

 

EXHIBITION: Whittemore Public Library, Naugatuck, CT — Brass Valley Photographs

 EXHIBITION: Whittemore Public Library, Naugatuck, CT, through October 27, 2023

Photographs of Connecticut's "Brass Valley," taken by Emery Roth before the brass mills closed. Above is a detail from "Made in the USA" showing Willy supervising furnaces of the last operating casting furnace of American Brass in Ansonia.

NOVEMBER EXHIBITION: Whittemore Library, Naugatuck, CT.

The last of the brass factories in the Naugatuck Valley shut down in 2013, but photographs I took in the mills from 2011 to 2013 preserve the last pours in the American Brass casting shop in Ansonia and the tube mill in Waterbury. A selection of these will be on included in an exhibition at the Whiteemore Library in Naugatuck through the month of November.

Also included in the exhibition are photos taken in the Farrel Machine Tool factories in Ansonia. The Farrel foundry was demolished this past summer. In the photo below Mike is about to remove freshly cast billets from the American Brass casting furnace in Ansonia.