At the Cutting Edge No.2

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: 

Shift

Amid the foundry's hollow rumble:

the shapes of idle benches trace 

the path of spectral pipe

that circumnavigated the globe,

and a sign from OSHA rots and warns

where grease of absent fingers plays

on the buttons that hang from the overhead crane,

and here at a bench where power surges

where are the hard hats and safety glasses

for the queued shadows of the next shift?

At the Cutting Edge

The Foundry

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: The foundry sits on the site where Anson Phelps founded the original Ansonia Brass & Battery Co.  At the center of the foundry the furnace rumbles. It's so large that its ducts and stacks disappear among the dark trusses of the foundry's roof, so large its hard to find a place to stand back and take it all in. It's a twisting, sculptural pile of ducts, pipes, wires, a tin dragon with the giant crucible at its center.

"Foundry"! I'd forgotten the origin of the word, from fundus, bottom or base. The founder was the one who gave the base metal its form and properties. He was the magic man who knew the spells and recipes and the Birmingham secrets, who summoned furious fires and tempered their burn, who charged the crucible, melted the charge and balanced the melt with alloys, and refined it to purge unwanted gases and who determined at last when the time was right for tapping. The founder was a magic man who toned and tuned the molecules and engineered machines and factories that turned base metal into wealth and power.

The great, Faustian beast still rumbles and roars, the fire in its belly kept hot by a few machinists and engineers with a supply of parts, grease and belts. The fire is reduced and the output of brass, a trickle. Looking closely around the rusting stacks and pipes, bins and tanks, someone with knowledge could read a furnace history in the alterations, adaptations and innovations, encrustations wrought by earlier generations to make founding foolproof. Abandoned machines sit idle and corroding, becoming fossils even as core operations churn slowly. It's the last of its kind, the end of a line. In it are the alchemists' secrets, though the alchemists themselves have moved on.

At the Crucible

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: The casting shop is a place of Stygian magnificence. Although the end of the shed is open to fresh air and daylight, inside the air is viscous and sooty, and one sees as if through cataracts into a tarred and dusted world that sucks up light and then suddenly sparkles and flares. Yesterday's image was shot here shortly after a truckload of scrap had been delivered. Along the edges of darkness they stacked gleaming bricks of discarded copper wire pressed tight the way unwanted cars are pressed tight at the auto junkyard. Wherever light caught the edges of the bricks they lit up like treasure chests.

The shed is extensive and lofty, and daylight glares from points on the far perimeter. It is strewn with dinosaurs of the brass industry's past, conveyors and compressors, tanks, pipes, and ducts, strange engines the size of cabins, rusted relics. Most appear to be in ruins, but along the back wall, as if from a great cave, this giant crucible still roars and glows. As Mike pushes a button the crucible tips, and molten copper flows into two molds. The molds are hard to make out as they drop into a pit below floor level where they are bathed in luminous water. It takes a long time for the molds to fill, but once they are loaded and gently cooled, Mike will hoist out two pillars of copper, fatter than telephone poles and glowing red.

The casting shed is a nasty place for taking pictures, with both too little and too much light. I put on my fastest lens, stop it all the way open, turn the ISO up to 1600 and try to squeeze out acceptable exposures at 1/80th of a second while dodging lens flare. I can't see to focus, and at f/1.8 focus should be precise. Sometimes I have trouble seeing the compositions through the viewfinder, and as I work my hands and gear turn black and buttery. It is a nasty place for taking pictures, and I keep going back for more.

Scrap

A Gordian Knot

Worm-like, 

wriggled free of earth, 

in fact, mind's alchemy conjures them 

to charge and channel the forms of mind,

but where did mind wriggle from, and 

what are its boundaries? 

Truly a can of worms!

Elegy

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:

I read Brent's email message late one Sunday evening, and I understood it was sent with the same spirit and urgency one gives to notes sharing news of the looming death of a dear, old friend. This note concerned a barn. It stood in the very center of the Great Hollow in Kent, Connecticut, and I had been exploring and photographing it with permission of the owner for several years. The barn was not especially old, but it looked massive, and even though it was not authentic (not even a real gambrel but a 1940's, hoop-less, barrel-like concoction), it completed the farmstead of an authentic 18th century farmhouse and was iconic New England. Though there were much older barns in the Great Hollow, no postcard would better proclaim the farm heritage of the place than one showing this farmstead.

Many times while shooting here I had walked the short ramp to the spot in the side where the barrel roof had been framed out to make a large door through which tractors and wagons once entered the barn. I had never dared to step inside. The floor was rotten. The space was dark and vast, and it took several visits before I noted a wooden structure, like a small silo near the back wall. Only then did I also find the narrow stair where the neighboring barn abutted, a stair which wound down to a passage and to what I took to be a cramped milking room. It must have been the height of modernity in the '40's when the complex was built. It had a well that seemed too narrow for cows. I would have loved to have seen how it worked. Grain was gravity fed from the previously mentioned bin in the hayloft above to several dispensers around the perimeter and above the milk room well. Locals occasionally recalled when this farm had filled the center of the hollow with cows.

I had, in fact, visited a few days before Brent's email and had noticed and photographed strange bulges in the roof, like the hemorrhaging of some internal organ beneath the skin of an animal or like a huge blister ready to pop. I had no idea then that the disease was fatal. When I finally got back a few days after Brent's email, I was too late.

Barns fail from the roof down, but it's usually the structural members that support the roof that rot and give way. This barn was all roof; the great barrel rested on the masonry of the lower level, dug into the hill and below ground; when the western two-thirds gave way it came down level with the ground. The world unwinds slowly, but sometimes the signature event is over so quickly nobody hears it fall or knows what's gone.

Daily Passages

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:

Passages

Old faces
Attendant at the stoop.
Familiar handshake,
Full fist of cool brass
And the twitter of the hinges. -

The mind embraces them decades later;

And decades later,
There at the threshold,
Does the music also still resound,
Footfalls' echoes pad the hall?

School's Out

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: As my photographic explorations among the hills of Connecticut, New York and Massachusetts carry me further from home I've often been surprised at the number of one room school houses that remain standing. Perhaps because I grew up in the city, I used to imagine these old structures to be relics of the 19th century, and I wondered how it could be that they remain standing.

Fortunately, some have historical markers from which I've learned that in rural areas within an hour or two of New York City one room schoolhouses were common into the 1940s, and it is in their nature that there were many; sometimes one every two or three miles, as the students who attended them lived within walking distance. They also survive because memories maintain them; those who were students there in the thirties and forties will sometimes do the bit of upkeep and lobby to restore them. On the Connecticut side of the border many have been accepted as cultural artifacts worthy of town funds and historic preservation. More often, on the New York side of the border they are lonely places that show their age and remind us how time slips insidiously by and how much we have changed.


NOTE: Special thanks to my friend Martin Kimmeldorf who has taken two of my photos and edited and combined them with images and words of his own. I recommend visiting his sites:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/martinsphotoart/5987675496/in/photostream/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/martinsphotoart/5992404393/in/photostream/

Sightseeing

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL

EPILOGUE: My visit to Eastern State Penitentiary was brief. I spent the better part of two days photographing there, walking the abandoned passages, peering into decaying cells, looking for photographs. I was a visitor, an outsider, maybe an intruder. My only other encounter with a real prison was an architectural project many years ago that took me inside the Pittsburgh City Jail. It was still in operation, an apparently efficient place with real prisoners and guards and checkpoints, and I recall being struck by the disjunction between the functions of imprisonment and the refined, rusticated graciousness of H.H. Richardson's Victorian detailing and design. Even though I couldn't see the prisoners in their cells, the presence of real people beyond the bars made the architectural incongruity overpowering. It was the clash of incompatible worlds or of the facade of culture and the underbelly of expedience.

Eastern State Penitentiary's effect on me was quite different. It had opened 1829 and closed in 1970. It was 41 years since it held prisoners, since guards maintained strict security routines, since the cell blocks throbbed with the pulse of daily life. Whatever graciousness had been in the place had crumbled to brutality. At first I unconsciously expected to find the artifacts of the prison's 19th century residents, but the artifacts we found were left by the largely Black and Hispanic prisoners that were there when it closed, people I might pass in the street or meet today. In the public sections I blended with other tourists snapping vacation pictures into i-Phones. Had any been imprisoned here? Nostalgic return was unthinkable, or was that what the rest of us were doing?

I went from block to block, cell to cell looking for meaning behind the ruins and found the voices of 140 years of imprisonment merging like a chorus so that it was almost possible to forget that each cell held a real person, some good, some wicked, but all with similar yearnings: life, liberty, pursuit of happiness. Ultimately, however, the power of the experience rested on recalling that each ancient cell held a real person, that it had done so for 140 years, and that such institutions are everywhere and everywhere invisible.

Abandoned Concrete Factory, 2011

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: Our factories are empty and our prisons are full.

Cell Block Five

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: Prisons are places set apart from time. Those who go to prison speak of losing so many years of their lives, and when they return to society, they often find society has moved beyond them and they are stuck in a different place, faded and decades apart.

Shaft

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: 9X9, rowed, stacked, and locked - so many cells, so many lives walled off. It is a place to learn what it means to be truly alone.

Final Cut or Close Shave

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: Prisons of stone restrain the body; their boundaries are clear, fixed, easy to define. The mind's prisons entrap the spirit; their edges are shadowy, indeterminate, always menacing.

The Conk

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: A prison is a community. It's nature is dependent on the interactions of individuals.

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL 2:  Freedom exists even where there is no liberty.

Bunk Beds

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: Count the number of prisoners and measure the size of society's failure. That failure reverberates through time in broken families, lost lives, defeat, poverty and desolation.

Underworld Overview

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: Prisons are ideas, laws made stone, a foundation to support community and the Golden Rule, walls to make us trust, a blockhouse defense against the forces of entropy and madness.

Cell Block Fourteen

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: Prisons open a path into crime. They are outposts of the underworld where breezes mingle with whispering secrets sharp as knives. They whistle along the edges of passageways, slip through stone, and nobody knows where they expire or who keeps tally of the honor of thieves.

NOTE: Those seeking a plan of Eastern State Penitentiary can find one here.

The Green Cell

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: Prisons provide a path to redemption. A penitentiery is a special kind of prison designed for the penitence and reform of the prisoner. Here the prescribed treatment for lasting and deep contrition was prolonged, solitary confinement.

Cell Block Seven

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: Prisons are ministers of punishment. They seek to console society and its victims by making those who caused suffering to suffer.

The Hub

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: Prisons may keep us safe or terrorize us, but they are always about control.

Orbits

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: In prison, the wings of imagination are borne on the winds of escape, but waiting is the endless orbit of doing time.

Cell Block Twelve, Floor Three

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: Imprisonment is antithetical to freedom. Prisons measure the failure of a society to be free. Their walls are scarred with that failure.

From Outside Cell Block Eight

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: We go to abandoned buildings to feel the past resonate in the present and to find out who we have become. The reverberations of an abandoned prison echo differently than other buildings. When a home, a hospital, a school, or a factory is abandoned it is usually a loss for a community with deep memories invested there. However, when a prison closes few mourn its passing, there is little nostalgia, and the memories are dispersed. Although the symbolism of prison is fundamental to society, most of us know prisons only from the outside and at a very great distance.

Guards' Window

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: I've been to The Pen. This is the place that originated the word, "penitentiary." I'm happy to say my trip was recreational. It makes a cosmos of difference. You can read about Eastern State Penitentiary here.

Moloch

WILLIAM PAPE, Waterbury, 1918: "Our industries might be gathered into the grasp of giant corporations whose controlling spirits, destitute alike of local affiliations and decency of sentiment, would cold-bloodedly close down many factories on the ground that Waterbury was not a logical site for an industry."

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: These turbines stand at the head of the factory shed where American Copper & Brass made pipe. The Naugatuck River, thirty of forty feet beyond the back wall, drove these turbines which animated machines the size of railroad cars and men by the train-load. The river has been unplugged. The trains are gone.

Factory Landscape

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: Interstate 84 heading east leaps from the western bluff of the Naugatuck Valley, and motorists find themselves looking down across the City of Waterbury from the top deck of a gangling, graceless structure known as, "the mixmaster," that spans the valley and connects I-84 with the city and the north-south highway.

Waterbury sits approximately half way up the Naugatuck Valley. It is the land of many rivers where the valley spreads out. It has always been too wet and rocky to farm, but mosquitos thrive. The local tribes called it Mattatuck, the land without trees, and wondered why white men would want to live there. The settlers called it, "Waterbury," and built mills on the rivers to manufacture buttons.

Through this window in the stair tower of an empty factory you could have watched Waterbury grow. Although the French Gothic towers and spires of St. Anne's and the French-Canadian community it served were probably there first, workers, some among them French-Canadian, probably stopped at this window to listen to the bells peal at the topping off ceremony when the dome was completed and the sanctuary finally occupied. That was shortly after World War I. It was the sort of day one might not even notice the smog.

Workers also probably stopped here around the start of World War II, when the smog was worse, to watch glaziers finish the shed roof over the pioneering, seamless pipe, production line going into service beneath. Some of them may have been baptized at St. Anne's, a church built with their parents' and grandparents' scrimped pennies.

French-Canadians were still working here in the 1950s when the new, double-barrelled, limited access "Route 8" carved its way up the valley, and in 1955 it's possible that workers entered here to salvage valuable equipment and documents from the factory as the city flooded and the copper tube production line was all under water. There's a sign in the shed to mark how high the water rose.

There were already fewer French-Canadians watching in 1971 when St. Anne's caught fire for the first time. It's said that after Interstate 84 set it's big footprints across the city, Waterbury was never quite the same, though at the time (1967) they envisioned a new city of gleaming, brass-trimmed towers.

The skies over Waterbury are clearer now. To those who drive Interstate 84 frequently, the spires of St. Anne's Church, shown here, the tall, slender tower of Union Station, and Holyland's cross on top of the eastern bluff of the Valley are familiar landmarks. Unless traffic is snarled, motorists have a two minute window on Waterbury and then it's gone. It's almost the blink of an eye.

Brass Mill Extrusion Press

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: When one steps into the past the air should be chalky and the sound disjunct, but here the wheels are still oiled and turning, and the steam is still hissing and purring softly. I watched a man hoist 20 foot lengths of copper tubing out of a bath of hydrochloric acid, the liquid cascading from the far end back into a long tub beneath. The bundle of tubes was then carried out of sight on a giant crane that straddled the building.

The enertia of great wheels keeps them spinning slowly, long after all other wheels have ceased. So it is here where a small amount of large diameter copper tubing is still made using technology put in place during World War II. No trains run here now, and only a few men work the floor. Beyond are other buildings of the complex, silent but for the haunting of pigeons, but its appropriate to start here where the music still plays in what is, as it were, a grand ballroom of another era.

The Naugatuck Line No. 2

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:  

Train Departing

The past is a cacophonous tumult

a maelstrom of melodies

some singing

some wailing

some marching defiantly. 

A railroad coach abandoned half way up the Naugatuck Valley

it's ruined upholstery, a nesting place for rodents and small birds

the meaning of the train

the track

the valley 

whiplash through time 

factory gears flash

amassing brassy fortunes

sparking dreams

winning wars

grinding lives to ash

populating suburbs with 2-car families. 

If not quite music, may it be chaos akin to the orchestra tuning up!

The black track along the river, where does it come from, where does it lead?

On the side of the coach a swastika has been spray-painted, an ancient tune. 

Who put it there and when? How does it reverberate out of the valley's past? How does it partake of the Valley's bigotries and rivalries, its compromises and its compassion?  Or is it the scornful howl of those who have come unhinged from history, beside the walls of Bedlam while the rest of us try to remember the past.

The Naugatuck Line

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:

Next Stop High Rock Grove, 1876

The train is sidetracked, loitering, killing time while the rails rust. They say the conductor died, but I've heard his voice, the conductor who became Superintendent of the Railroad and spoke with quiet authority.

"Tickets, fifty cents. Children under 12 half price. Leaving the station at 9 AM, please deposit lunch baskets in the special baggage car provided at the rear of the train, and watch your step. Proceeds will help support the Poor Children's Excursion Fund. Ten minutes to board"

The black track that runs along the river leads back in time 'til we near the hiss of steam and the whistle's white shriek, and we pass the surging hum of production for two World Wars. When we pass Seymour remember to look for the old natural falls and the channel they built there before the highway climbed over it.

"All aboard the Brass Valley Special with stops in Shelton, Birmingham, Ansonia Station, Seymour, Beacon Falls, and final destination, High Rock Grove."

That's where railroad superintendent, George W. Beach, has built a people's park at that point in the river where the hills narrow to a gorge. It's a cool spot in the shadow of the valley, a cool spot above Beacon Falls Dam, a quiet spot where the dam channels the water to make rubber shoes and woolen shawls and bronze piano-panels and leather belting and laces. We're near High Rock Grove when we see Rock Rimmon, like a plug in the valley, 400 feet high, but the train slips through, and as we slide back in time you may catch the strains of the Home Woolen Band riding on the wind from their daily noontime concert, but as we slip over the centennial the band fades and the mill's making rubber shoes.

"Beacon Falls; All aboard!"

Beacon Falls that brought fire to America with the first strike anywhere matches had been a flickering light, sometimes abandoned, but as we near our destination it is thriving and has recently been incorporated. We're almost there. Above the dam the river narrows to a deep defile, pauses so young men flaunting mutton chops can row on still waters as women recline in the backs of boats under mushroomy parasols.

"High Rock Grove, last stop."

A simple platform tames the wilderness and the letters "HRG," spelled in floral planting and children's laughter. We follow the music of the Thomas Full Orchestra to a grand pavilion and a shady grove where we spread blankets, picnic, and play croquet. There's skating at the rink to the Wheeler and Wilson Band, and Mr. Marsh our gentlemanly caterer furnishes refreshments at reasonable rates.

"Joy and gladness is the order of the day."

We follow trails deep into Sherman's Gorge, a precipitous course, past thick-thighed cataracts, dark pools, and mossy caves to where the world still grows wild, and adventures might yet be (though the indians have gone), until we arrive atop Lookout Point where some think the Indian Toby fell to his death, and a grand pavillion rises above the hills so our eyes can follow the full arc of the day.

At the opening celebrations even the well-heeled from Winsted have come in coaches down the rails to mix with the recently scrubbed, and occasionally since on the 4th of July.

At the Naugatuck Railroad's peak one could catch several trains daily to Bridgeport and New York City, but High Rock Grove was a favorite stop for families and especially children. Today a new commuter service as far up as Waterbury struggles to grow, the grove is now a forest and the High Rock, a hash of graffiti and shredded American flags, the trails are untended, but magical transports like this lie on idle sidings along the partially abandoned line.

When the trains pass down the black track, where do they lead. Can we still count the ties to yesterday and find the valley as it was when George Beach built the pavillion atop High Rock with the park at its feet, a new parthenon for picnics and parasols and rowing behind the dam?

The Hook

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL, "Farrel":

I've been shooting recently at what's left of the old Farrel works in Ansonia. In 1848, the year the railroad went into operation, Almon Farrel, who had engineered construction of Ansonia and the Ansonia Canal for Anson Phelps, went out on his own. He founded Almon Farrel & Company to manufacture things for manufacturing and to supply heavy machinery to manufacturers throughout the Naugatuck Valley. By the 1850s Farrel also had a factory in Waterbury.

At the time Charles Goodyear had recently patented his process using sulphor to harden rubber and called it, "vulcanization." His brother Henry Goodyear had built a rubber factory upstream in Naugatuck, the town that eventually made Naugahyde. Charles Goodyear famously died penniless (You can read about him here.) but vulcanization made rubber useful for seals, shoes, tires, gaskets, elastic bands, bumpers and balloons. It was the first, plastic "plastic." It fired imaginations, changed how simple things were done, provided much work and added a robust, sulfurous mix of seasonings to the Naugatuck River brew.

Both Birmingham Corporation and Farrel Corporation began manufacturing the equipment to manufacture rubber, and the entire Naugatuck Valley was becoming a powerhouse of industry in time for the Civil War.

In the 1870s under Almon's son Franklin Farrel, Farrel Corporation began manufacturing machines for grinding sugar cane. A single machine filled 80 freight cars on its way down to Bridgeport where it filled an entire ship bound for Cuba, and Franklin Farrel bought sugar estates in Santo Domingo and Cuba as inexpensive sugar became available to the middle classes in the U.S., and uprisings were managed in the Caribbean and, especially in 1919 and 1920, at home. During both World Wars Farrel works was running round-the-clock shifts.

The Farrel Corporation long ago merged with the Anson Phelps copper and brass works and with the old Birmingham Foundry. On May 6, 1981, Franklin Farrel IV resigned as assistant secretary of the Farrel Machinery Group ending family participation in the business. Today Farrel has offices in more than 30 countries, but the worldwide headquarters and the old hook in this photograph are still in Ansonia.

Lift

FRANK PACHRON: "When I was in high school, they gave me a tour of the brass mill, and they said, 'This is your college.'"
(from Brass Valley by Jeremy Brecher, Jerry Lombardi, and Jan Stackhouse)

Between Wings

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:

Death Rattle

Like an empty tarmac, 

the work floor lies,

a broken promise.

Windows covered 

in corrugated tin 

rattle like machine gun fire

in a distant bay,

chatter nearby, 

but there are no machines, 

no fire,

only two column lines 

to carry 

the stacked 

load 

under production

and beyond the din.

Factory Stair, Torrington

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: The 1845 potato famine in Ireland coincided with the building of the railroad up the Naugatuck Valley, and so it was hungry and mostly illiterate, unskilled men with brogues who leveled the roadbed and laid the track along the river all the way to Winsted. Completed in 1848, it opened the valley to industry and carried the products of those industries to Bridgeport and the world. Trains brought coal, copper, zinc, tin, jobs and cheap labor and took away buttons and kettles, pins and pipes, clips and clocks. Brass was the plastic of its time; uses were burgeoning, and the Naugatuck Valley was competing with Birmingham, England, to be the brass-making center of the world.

How can I touch those struggles in the crumbling brick and rusting ducts that remain of this industrial empire? Where can my camera catch reflections of the imaginations fired by new engineering challenges and devising machines, procedures and new metallurgy to make things faster, better, cheaper? Where do the halls still echo the machinists' practiced craft and confidence? Where does the floor still creak from the daily passage of unskilled, buggy-luggers and grunts working 12-hour days and six day weeks or sometimes not working at all? Can photographs get near any of these?

Output at the mills fluctuated but industry boomed during the Civil War, and after the war the rest of us came and the Valley began to fill up. The trains brought Italians, and Lithuanians and Russians along with the coal and the copper and the tin. Like the Irish, many of us were illiterate and unskilled. In addition, we spoke no English.

Mill owners built villages to house us and systems to provide water and food, to keep the peace, and to manage town affairs. It was a massive undertaking to create civic institutions that would support the growing population. They hired prestigious designers like Cass Gilbert, McKim, Meade and White, Olmstead Bros. to design civic buildings and public spaces that would reflect the confidence of the region and provide a foundation of hallowed permanence. The policemen and firemen and the apprentices on the way up were mostly Irish, but we all formed clubs, gangs, factions and unions, and we were encouraged to back political candidates and vote. Banding in groups of our own kind, we struggled over identity, flexed muscle and sometimes rumbled.

Much of what the trains brought was pumped out into the Naugatuck or up into the air. It settled into everything, made the river smell and the air taste bad, and in Waterbury and Naugatuck people with money lived upwind, west of its stench. In Derby, whenever we passed the Hull Dye Works our children guessed at the river's color that day, but we worked hard and raised families as best we could. Those who worked at the pickle tubs got metal fume fever and called it spelters' shakes, and rollers lost arms, but workers with experience argued over the best cures - whether oatmeal or hot cider and pepper cured Spelters' Shakes better and warned us about how much of our arm we'd lose on each machine.

During the Great War there were plenty of jobs, 24 hours a day, and after the war there were strikes and violence in the Valley and in 1920 the National Guard was called in. There was bloodshed, and some were called subversives, but the mills kept growing, and some of us became foremen.

In the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, D.C. are prototype models of many of the machines that operated in these factories. There are thousands of them. They look like sophisticated toys, but they actually run. What's left today in these hollow spaces where the actual machines ran? What memories echo here? One must listen closely to hear the past behind the sound of the river and the wind.