Rod Mill Sunset

PHOTOGRAPHER’S JOURNAL: Factories cluster along a rail corridor like swine at a food trough, and bridges carry everything from people to cranes to utility conduits over the tracks. There were many bridges, but there was only one road crossing the mill site. Sunset illuminates the road from the riverside up to Liberty Street. The old rolling mill was in the dark building on the left, though for modern workers it was the flat wire mill. The rod mill is on the right and stretches an equal distance behind me as in front of me. This is a universal landscape of industrial America, the landscape that Gropius idealized and aesthetized.  

A bridge was built here sometime between 1890 and 1895. There is a trick to this bridge, and for a long time it puzzled me. (text continued below)

The bridge does not end at the factory wall but continues across the bay to an attic-like space that runs above much of the length of the rod mill. Like this bridge, the bridge that crossed the tracks in 1895 reached well beyond the rail corridor to a narrow work shed which the map labels, “Burner Shop,” of "Wallace & Sons Manuf’rs of Brass and Copper Goods.” Men worked there on edging lathes, and in a press room. Was this the bridge that carried the finished burners across the tracks to the “Lamp Depart" and “Stock R’m” at about the time Edison and Tezla fought the battle of the currents in White City? (text continued below)

After White City was done glistening, factories became even more like big machines. The dark “dormer,” which casts it shadow beside the old rolling mill, is really the stub end of a missing bridge over which rode a monorail crane. The old crane is still parked inside the stub of the bridge (shown here: http://rothphotos.blogspot.com/2014/10/parked.html), and the track still runs down the length of the attic and turns right at the end of the rod mill. Once, it crossed the yard to the casting house, turned left and crossed back over the track, connecting finally to what used to be the rolling mill built by Ansonia Brass & Copper, the company started here by Anson Phelps. One can see both bridges for the first time in the 1921, aerial map of Ansonia (https://www.loc.gov/resource/g3784a.pm000770/). The second monorail bridge is the covered bridge with the skylight and roof vents. Behind it is the two-story bridge of the Farrel sand elevator.

Inside the Three Gables

SLIDE TALK SCHEDULE

March 1-29 - Photos on exhibit at Silas Bronson Library, Waterbury 

Mar 22 @ 6 PM - Derby Neck Library, Derby

April 7-29 - Photos on exhibit at Hagaman Library, East Haven, CT

April 12 @ 6:30 - Beacon Falls Public Library

April 23 - "Picture It” visual harmony to  the Waterbury Symphony Orchestra 

Apr 27 @  6:30 PM - Hagaman Memorial Library, East Haven

May 4 @ 7 PM - Windsor Locks Public Library

May 17 @ 6 PM - Wolcott Public Library

[This is the continuation of a series of posts begun on this blog in December, 2015, concerning the rail corridor in Ansonia that runs through the last great mill sites of Brass Valley. Those interested in picking up from the beginning might start at, “Anyplace USA,” Dec. 22 blog post.]

PHOTOGRAPHER’S JOURNAL: I’m standing in the great space that ends in the Three Gables of American Brass, Ansonia, two of which lie in front of me. Readers of this blog will be familiar with the exterior; the windows at the end of this great central row of bays are stepped to match the incline of the cross-factory road, that rises from the riverside to the bridge across the canal and to Liberty Street. 

In tha back aisle late-day sun through skylights lights old stone foundations that hint at secrets of the work-sheds lineage. Between the rows of skylights I can’t see (but which I know are there) are the cupola vents with the pentangle finials; it is this space, beside tinning and riveting, about whose lineage I’ve been speculating. It is the oldest section of the mill site.

If I stood and looked this way in 1866, I would have been looking into the Wallace and Sons rolling mill as men and machines rolled brass that would be used for a hundred different items supporting the North. Back then there would have been walls where the columns march. Those columns and trusses were set in place between 1900 and 1906 as the property passed from Wallace & Sons, to Coe Brass, and was then quickly consolidated into the new American Brass Company. From the outside this building looks like a cluster of sheds, but from inside, except for the surviving riveting room which hangs over the eastern aisle, it is one space with three aisles of bays. 

Beneath the stepped windows, embedded in the factory wall, are the piled stones of the ramp, built to get over the canal to Liberty Street. It’s hard for me not to think of old man Wallace and his sons supervising the the laying of those stones to assure the easy commerce between upper and lower portions of his milll. Where the ramp reaches it’s greatest height, stone masons have carefully laid a heavy arch of stones over some tunnel, long ago bricked over. Where did it lead and why? Who once went there? On the other side of the ramp was Anson Phelps own brass mill.

However, the old stone wall beneath the cupola vents may be far older than the rolling mill, and the stones along the back wall, now splashed with late-day sun, seem even earlier than the stones of the ramp. They are larger and set with more care for fitting puzzle piece contours but with less concern for rising vertically, and somewhere a dozen or more feet behind them is the Ansonia canal, and it’s easy to believe Wallace & Sons set their early, two-story building on this site behind a dike wall that Almon and Franklin Farrel constructed to contain the canal they built for Anson Phelps on the founding of Ansonia. Almon and Franklin Farrel were laying the foundations of a future city, and the canal lured the industrialists and entrepreneurs to buy the metal Anson Phelps traded and which fueled 150 years of rising expectations and expanding opportunities amid work that was dirty and dangerous and purposeful.

[American Brass, Ansonia, flat wire mill; formerly the site of the original Wallace & Sons and later American Brass rolling mill.]

Voting for my Job

Removing the Distributer Cups

On Exhibition Now & Throughout March

Six Images from the Casting House

photographic images by Emery Roth

slide-talk: March 10 at 6 PM

Silas Bronson Library

267 Grand Street

Waterbury, Connecticut

PHOTOGRAPHER’S JOURNAL:  The distributer cups break the single flow of metal into small streams, as it flows into the molds, so that bubbles don’t form. They must be removed before the freshly poured billets can be pulled and set to cool. The last casting furnace stopped in December, 2013. The large prints in this exhibit try to capture the moods of the casting house in its last three years. It was at once one of the most beautiful and dirtiest places I've ever been.

Farrel Birmingham

PHOTOGRAPHER’S JOURNAL:  These are among the original buildings of the Farrel Foundry & Machine Company in Ansonia, CT. They have stood here since before the Civil War. They lie at the center of the history of Brass Valley. Few people who come here are not struck by the dark, green wood of these sheds. Inside, parts for some of the largest machines in industry were cast and finished.

In 1845 Almon Farrel dug the canal from the Kinneytown Dam that powered the industrial village that Anson Phelps built and called Ansonia. There Anson Phelps sold sites to entrepreneurs looking for a reliable supply of water power and the favorable encouragement of a landlord who wanted to sell them metal. Almon Farrel was among the first to step forward and purchase a site for what became Farrel Foundry & Machine Company. Farrel made the machines to power the mills and eventually the machines to make the things the other mills made. They were busy even before the Civil War.

Together with the Birmingham Company, across the river in the other industrial village Anson Phelps built, they made much of the mill equipment that powered Brass Valley. Eventually they merged into Farrel Birmingham, and this became their center. These are the sheds in which much of Brass Valley was literally built. As far as I know, the city’s plan is to level them. I hope I am mistaken.

The opening on the right was made to accommodate a train, but the one on the left admits cars to a steep driveway leading through the middle of the mill buildings and a series of courtyards and eventually up to Main Street. They tell me it is known locally as, “The Tunnel.” Early maps show clearly that, before the sheds were extended along the track, the road simply encircled the building to get up to Main Street.

Waterbury Parade

PHOTOGRAPHER’S JOURNAL: In Waterbury on Sunday, looking from the steps of City Hall toward the former headquarters of Chase Brass Company designed by Cass Gilbert; it is now part of Waterbury's Government Center.

Building 7

[Anaconda American Brass in Ansonia, box shop]

PHOTOGRAPHER’S JOURNAL: Follow the factory road north from the crossroad to beyond the high, north-facing windows of the machine shop, where cats slumber and feed, and you reach the building they called the Box Shop. 

The actual shop where, I presume, boxes were made to hold product, was in the bay on the right. The stripped Chrysler Coronado has parked there for as long as I’ve been visiting. Inside the box shop the former occupants could still be found hanging from hooks and nails, in drawers, on counters, and stashed into cubbies. Everything down to the aspirin had been left, while the building crumbled around and above, but among shadowy creaks and silence there might as well have been box-builders, a Coronado driver, perhaps.

Building 7 appears on maps of Ansonia for the first time in 1911 where it is identified as the, “Carpenter Shop," of "Coe Brass Mfg Co.” On previous maps this site was the Wallace & Sons Brass Co., and on future maps it will be part of American Brass Company, but in 1911, as consolidation of the brass industry is underway, it is Coe Brass. 

The bay on the left was open to the elements and empty. We trusted a crumbling stair once, long ago, to get to the second floor. There we found a beautiful long gallery lined with windows on both sides and completely empty. I was hesitant to trust the floor, knowing the condition of the shop below, and took no memorable pictures. I never dared the stair again before the building was leveled last summer.

The Coronado is still there - moved across the yard.

Vanishing Brass

Finding Brass Valley, 

a Place in Time that Has Almost Vanished

SLIDE TALK: Woodbury Public Library, Tuesday, February 16, at 7 PM

PHOTOGRAPHER’S JOURNAL: The old American Brass casting shop in Ansonia, they  tell me, is suffering its final winter of abuse. This image from 2013 will do. Too far to make the trip again in snow to catch it under snowfall. But to catch it hung with icicles! 

SLIDE TALK SCHEDULE

Feb 16 @ 7 PM - Woodbury Public Library (snow date, Feb. 23)

Feb 25 @ 6 PM - Ansonia Public Library

March 1-29 - Photos on exhibit at Silas Bronson Library, Waterbury 

Mar 10 @ 6 PM - Silas Bronson Library (snow date, Mar 14)

Mar 12 @ 6 PM - Railroad Museum of New England, Thomaston

Mar 22 @ 6 PM - Derby Neck Library, Derby

April 7-29 - Photos on exhibit at Hagaman Library, East Haven, CT

Apr 27 @  6:30 PM - Hagaman Memorial Library, East Haven

May 4 @ 7 PM - Windsor Locks Public Library

May 17 @ 6 PM - Wolcott Public Library

November 12 - January, 2017 - Photos on exhibit Minor Public Library, Roxbury

Nov. 12 @    - Minor Public Library, Roxbury, CT

Winter Green, Waterbury

Main Street Time Lapse, Ansonia

PHOTOGRAPHER’S JOURNAL: The first photo was easy to take at 7:15, on Sunday evening, 2011. The last, taken last Sunday evening when I thought there would be few cars, put me in the path of headlights. It’s good to see the changes.

Sunday, May 1, 2011, 7:15 PM

 Tuesday, March 17, 2015, 7:30 PM

Sunday, January 31, 2016, 6:17 PM

Cutting Up

PHOTOGRAPHER’S JOURNAL: I wasn’t there the day the crane came down, but an i-phone video they showed me the next day, suggests it was done with masterful indelicacy. They cut it loose and dropped it. I already posted a picture of the fork lift they used to move and turn the fallen carcass as Mike cut it apart. Here is the rest of the drama.

Control

NEXT SLIDE TALK:
Housatonic Museum of Art - Housatonic Community College, Bridgeport
February 10 @ 11:45, HCC Events Center

PHOTOGRAPHER’S JOURNAL: When Anson Phelps, in 1845, built a well-watered canal from the Kinneytown Dam in Seymour for a mile-and-a-quarter, to bring power to mill sites in a new industrial village he called, “Ansonia,” he put his own brass and copper mill in buildings somewhere near the back of this picture. We are looking north from the south end of the extrusion mill on the southeast corner of the American Brass crossroad.

Ansonia Copper & Brass (AC&B), that until December or 2013 still had operations on this site, claimed its ancestry back to Anson Phelps original Ansonia Brass & Copper (AB&C). Shortly after 1900 it became part of American Brass with mills throughout brass valley and covering all four corners of the crossroad. We are looking down the conveyor of the last, major piece of new equipment installed in the Ansonia millworks, I’m told sometime in the 1960s or 70s when this mill went by the name, “Anaconda American Brass.” 

The ladder leads to a bridge crossing the conveyor, and the giant extruder is to the left. Ladders run up its sides and catwalks cross the top. It is like a small ship with its decks leading fore and aft; ladders lead to spaces “below deck,” where motors churn, yet it is small next to its conveyors. I never saw it in operation. I’m told it could extrude continuous lengths of metal rod which could be sent down the conveyor or wrapped on spools that rotated automatically and looked to me a bit like the amusement park ride known as, “The Whip.” When the extruder was installed, it was state of the art.

The yellow crane in the distance is the same 5-ton crane discussed in the last paragraph of the previous photograph in this series, “Picking.”

Post-Deco

PHOTOGRAPHER’S JOURNAL: Since I began photographing it in 2011, this sand elevator in Ansonia, has drawn me back like no other structure I know. In that time I’ve taken images of it that pleased me; posted some publicly.  Until I took this image earlier this week, none had caught the full potential of this monument as I feel it until this one. It sings a song of us.

Picking

PHOTOGRAPHER’S JOURNAL: (refer to http://rothphotos@blogspot.com for earlier posts in the series)

The southeast corner of the brass mill crossroad was where Anson Phelps set his first Ansonia brass mill, though this building, in the photo, is of a later era. Mike is cutting apart one of the 5-ton traveling cranes, cleaning the building for efficient demolition. It has been an idle extrusion mill through the wink of time that I’ve been coming here. By spring, they say, the building may be gone.

The maps of 1884 and 1890 paint a picture of what happened here then. This photograph begins at what was then, probably, the edge of the mill yard. The yard is behind me in this image, and I’m beside the yard-office, cartloads coming and going, men swearing in many languages. By 1890 the perimeter of the yard has been nibbled away by many small buildings, and the central yard office of 1884 has become a new shipping department with testing facilities connected to the large mill which once stood in my picture. 

The 1890 map calls this large building, “Muffle R’m,” and says it has an “Iron Floor.” It is the largest building on the property. The map shows the “Casting Shop,” off to the right, and in the bay in front of Mike stood the Rolling Mill with two sections, one for “Brazed Tube,” and the other identified as the “Rod R’m.” Further back and probably dug into the hillside and/or raised to a second level, beside the canal, were a series of small rooms, some showing furnace blocks. A stair indicates a partial second floor, and one room is designated for pickling and must have been nearly as high as, and accessible to, the adjacent rolling mill. 

Even this only covers half of the current building site, and at the time of the 1890 map Ansonia Brass & Copper was building a new rod mill on the other half of the site. It would be on property between the brass mill and Farrel that had belonged to, “Postal Telegraph & Cable Co.”  More departments would mean new workers, more managers, and people moving up. Younger workers watching, considering opportunities. It would mean more people riding trollies and shopping on Main Street. It would mean telephones and later radio and automobiles.

The 1895 map shows the rod mill completed, and the old mill yard is filled in, all the small buildings gone, and a new mill for seamless tube abuts the existing structure covering the space to the factory road across from the Three Gables. The map shows the new tube mill with raised skylights down the middle of the building, two rows at right angles and crossing at the midpoint; four narrow gables are in the middle of each facade; one looks across at the Three Gables. I imagine beneath the tube mill skylights are aisles, where people pushed carts between benches, and cranes moved seamless tube, and the sounds of steam and heavy metal were constant. 

The Ansonia Brass & Copper company of Anson Phelps had grown to fill the southeast corner of the crossroad. It had become a complex cluster of brick buildings, stacks, skylights and gables. By 1906 it would all be part of American Brass. The southeast corner structures of 1890 are essentially, what is shown on the 1921 aerial, though the tube mill was a short-lived venture. The crossed skylights are gone, and after 1906 it was designated as a machine shop. However, none of these structures appears to be what exists on this corner today. 

Above Mike’s head in the photograph, parked and waiting at the top of the next bay, is another 5-ton crane that Mike will drop to the floor and pick apart like a bird of prey at the bones of a carcass. However, there is machinery yet in this place to merit its immensity.

[Anaconda American Brass Company, Extrusion Mill, Ansonia]

Demolition Crossroad

PHOTOGRAPHER’S JOURNAL: [Anaconda American Brass, Ansonia, Dec. 2015]

(earlier posts in this series are below)

Since before 1900 paths have been crossing here, midway along the east-west factory road between Liberty Street, at the top of the Hill, and the riverside yard, at the bottom. That is where the east west factory road crosses the north-south factory road that runs beside Naugatuck rail corridor. Even today people find each other here beside the tracks. Sometimes they stop in conversation - have a smoke - wait for a passing train or pause conversation while it passes. Today conversation is about gas tanks for Mike's torch as the site is picked for scrap and junk.

On three of four corners around this crossroad the three major manufacturing buildings of Anaconda American Brass in Ansonia still converge: the extrusion mill in the southeast where the round mirror hangs; the rod mill, diagonally in the northwest and shown reflected in the round mirror: the flat-wire mill in the northeast and out of the conversation. 

Today's conversations concerned removing part of a large crane being chopped for scrap. There was also a track crew from the railroad who drove in on rubber tires and, after some moments of adjustment, drove off on steel wheels. Nifty!

The powerhouse, shown here suffering through neglect, scrap & salvage, claims the fourth corner. Behind it are Ansonia’s two, remaining, giant, masonry stacks: Closest is the casting house stack of American Brass; Farther off and connected to the Farrel campus is the stack that appears on the 1906 map. It serves a building with a "Dynamo Rm” and three “force pumps.” A note on the map suggests these may have been for fighting fire, and carefully located beside the river.

Traffic from the American Brass casting house often followed the road from the riverside up the hill to the metal labs, in the administration building on Liberty Street where an engineer checked to make sure the alloy sample they carried matched specification. Meanwhile the men waited at the casting furnace below for approval to pour. 

Along another axis, the offices behind the giant extruder at the south end of the extrusion mill and the machine shops by the high windows at the north end of the flat-wire mill sometimes exchanged envoys. I rarely saw people at either place, though there were always nervous cats by the high north windows of the machine shop. But envoys could sometimes be found here.

SLIDE TALK / BOOK SIGNING schedule

Jan 28 @ 7 PM - New Britain Industrial Museum (snow date Feb. 4)

Feb 10 - Housatonic Museum of Art

Feb 16 @ 7 PM - Woodbury Public Library (snow date, Mar. 1)

Feb 25 @ 6 PM - Ansonia Public Library

March 1-29 - Photos on exhibit at Silas Bronson Library, Waterbury 

Mar 10 @ 6 PM - Silas Bronson Library (snow date, Mar 14)

Mar 12 @ 6 PM - Railroad Museum of New England, Thomaston

April 7-29 - Photos on exhibit at Hagaman Library, East Haven, CT

Apr 27 @  6:30 PM - Hagaman Memorial Library, East Haven

May 4 @ 7 PM - Windsor Locks Public Library

May 17 @ 6 PM - Wolcott Public Library

November 12 - January, 2017 - Photos on exhibit Minor Public Library, Roxbury

Nov. 12 @    - Minor Public Library, Roxbury, CT

Delivery

PHOTOGRAPHER’S JOURNAL:  Shadows shift as the fork lift of the previous photo has passed beside ragged gables that mark the vanished line between Wallace Brass and Phelps Brass. As previously noted, the 1906 map clearly shows three gables, the old boundary line has become the primary east-west passage across a mostly continuous north-south barricade of parallel factory sheds, and the map now labels it all "American Brass Company."

The map of 1900 offers other annotations to the noteworthy building on the corner. Its roof, where the heady tin vent-ware now sits, was labeled, “iron roof on iron truss,” and what seems, a door was drawn at what may be either the midpoint in the long, slightly wedge-shaped building, or a point where two structures were melded into one building. On one side of the door is the “Wire Dep’t,” and “Riveting.” On the other side is the drawing of the roof above the iron truss. Later maps add skylights to it, in 1921 there are cupolas drawn onto the aerial of Ansonia.

Revelation: I’ve stood at that door, opened it and looked along a splintered matchstick catwalk through concentric truss-work triangles diminishing in the distance.  It glowed under skylights like those shown on the 1906 map. There is a platform beyond the door, 20 or 25 feet above the factory floor. I never dared trust it with my weight. To the right, shards of stair treads hang from a failing stringers that descend 25 feet to the floor below with, as I recall, balusters and banisters dangling. The 1906 map shows a narrow passage there. Such a passage might make sense if it contained a stair.

It is now apparent that this place where I have stood, between the "Wire Dep't" and the crumbling catwalk, was there as early as 1900. It lies where the wall jogs. All the maps from 1895 back to 1884 show that the wall jogs just there, and there has always been, as there is today, a division of spaces there. However at that spot the older maps show a thicket of slender stacks rising from furnaces. 

In 1884 three furnace blocks are marked 600hp. An adjacent section is marked “Tumbling Bbl’s.” The 1890 and 1895 maps show a fourth furnace block with a square chimney, and the adjacent building/section has been labeled, “Dipping & Tinning Rivet R’m.” Architecturally, it seems, from 1884 through 1895 the building is essentially unchanged, and when the chimneys disappeared from the maps in 1900, the place at the upper level was still devoted to riveting. There is a modern picture of what may have been the riveting room in Brass Valley: The Fall of an American Industry (p.117). The picture looks down an aisle in a hall of rowed and vacant shelving that once was a busy workplace.

The fork lift, balancing scrap buckets 300 and 314, turns the corner, passing in front of the old shed with the skirted cupola vents and the pentangle finials, which the maps suggest goes back to at least 1884. On the 1867 map a similarly proportioned block, a free-standing structure, appears in the  same location as the current building. Is it the same building? Not enough information in the maps to know, but as scrap buckets are carried to be scrap, if it is the same building, it probably riveted through the Civil War.

Finding Brass Valley, a Place in Time that Has Almost Vanished

UPCOMING SLIDE TALKS

Jan 28 @ 7 PM - New Britain Industrial Museum (snow date Feb. 4)

Feb 10 - Housatonic Museum of Art (time to be determined)

Feb 16 @ 7 PM - Woodbury Public Library (snow date, Feb. 23)

Feb 25 @ 6 PM - Ansonia Public Library

March 1-29 - Photos on exhibit at Silas Bronson Library, Waterbury 

Mar 10 @ 6 PM - Silas Bronson Library (snow date, Mar 14)

April 7-29 - Photos on exhibit at Hagaman Library, East Haven, CT

Apr 27 @  6:30 PM - Hagaman Memorial Library, East haven

May 17 @ 6 PM - Wolcott Public Library

The Three Gables and the Wallace Brass Co.

PHOTOGRAPHER’S JOURNAL: Another day and (for those who have been following this series of images) the camera is repositioned so as to still catch the corner of the building with the skirted cupola vents and Pentangle finials (though no vents or finials are in view here) as well as the factory road which cuts across the American Brass site in Ansonia. Shadows like bat wings, cast by the low, winter sunlight claw the rutted pavement of the factory road that crosses from Liberty Street down to the riverside. Two rusty scrap bins, on the teeth of a fork lift, are being brought from the casting house to an uncertain future. Once hundreds of these steel hampers, numbered and tracked, circulated between mills carrying scrap metal back to the foundry.

On the 1868 map of Ansonia, this passageway lies at the boundary between “Wallace and Sons Brass Works,” in the north and “Phelps Brass Works,” in the south. The three gables of the north wall lie along the old property boundary. Both companies were founded here in 1845. They prospered and grew side by side through the Civil War. The canal still flows here, that Almon Farrel built for Anson Phelps in 1845 to power his new industrial village which he called, “Ansonia," but the canal was long ago buried underground. The steel girders that line the sides of the road hint at the whole bridge now half sunk in a sea of asphalt.

By 1884, the map shows that  the bridge was a “covered bridge,” that crossed the canal here. It led into the main yard of Phelps brass works, on that map identified as Ansonia Brass and Copper. The map shows the “coke shed” lies ahead, but if you turn right, you will soon find, “the office.” 

On the map, the coke shed is hard up against the wall of a large building containing the the “Rolling Mill" and “General Mach’y,” facilities of Wallace & Sons, brass works. The back section also contains iron and annealing, “furn’s” whose forms are carefully marked. These facilities fill the area roughly covered by the three mills on the right side of this picture. 

By the 1906 map, both the Phelps mills and the Wallace mills are all labeled as, “American Brass Company,” and one can plainly see on that map the outline of three great gable ends facing onto the crossway through American Brass from Liberty Street to the riverside.

[American Brass, Ansonia]


PRELIMINARY SLIDE TALK SCHEDULE: 

Jan 28 @ 7 PM - New Britain Industrial Museum (snow date Feb. 4)

Feb 16 @ 7 PM - Woodbury Public Library (snow date, Mar. 1)

Feb 25 @ 6 PM - Ansonia Public Library

Throughout March - Photos on exhibit at Silas Bronson Library, Waterbury

Mar 10 @ 6 PM - Silas Bronson Library (snow date, Mar 14)

Throughout April - Photos on exhibit at Hagaman Library, East Haven, CT

Apr 27 @  6:30 PM - Hagaman Memorial Library, East haven

November 12 - January, 2017 - Photos on exhibit Minor Public Library, Roxbury

Nov. 12 @    - Minor Public Library, Roxbury, CT

Starlight

PHOTOGRAPHER’S JOURNAL: The mills of Farrel and American Brass in Ansonia make little fuss about appearances. They are a haphazard collection of additions, adaptations, and replacements, patches and hacks, whose only goal was getting the job done. And so since 2011 I’ve often stopped and sometimes photographed where the American Brass, Flat-Wire Mill sprouts skirted, tin cupolas with pentangle finials. When was this bit of virtuoso twinkle put in place?

Historical maps of Ansonia are a treasure trove of information (http://www.historicmapworks.com/Browse/United_States/Connecticut/). The building with the skirted, cupola vents lies at a recognizable intersection. The row of vents parallels the old Ansonia Canal which lies a half-dozen yards off. A bridge crosses the canal just where the building ends, and the factory road across the bridge continues down the slope and across the rail corridor to the river. As the road descends toward the tracks, the wall reveals three gable ends tracing the roofs of sheds behind them. From inside they now function as a single large space: the Flat-Wire Mill. The Canal is now invisible, buried underground, but the old iron bridge still erupts from the lumpy macadam in a way that only makes sense when you realize it is the truss and road of a forgotten bridge.

In the 1921 aerial map of Ansonia (https://www.loc.gov/resource/g3784a.pm000770/) three gables are clear, though the road beside them looks level. The top gabled roof, nearest the canal sports five (not four) tin cupola vents. Does the map even show a bit of an iron truss of a bridge over the canal. On maps before 1921 identification becomes more tenuous. Even in 1884, however, there are three long sheds close to this location. 1890 looks far different. A new rod mill is under construction, and the map includes detailed notes about what is happening in each section of the factory. Along the canal a long building is divided into lots of little shops. Could one of these be the current building? 1895 shows expansion of the same plan. One room holds in place in this long building through 1900; it is the tinning room. Could the skirted cupolas have been made there?

The 1906 map shows big changes have been made. For the first time the company is called American Brass Company instead of Ansonia Brass and Copper. Now the road across the mill site clearly shows the three gables, and, while the top building shows no cupola vents, it shows skylights similar to those on either side of the the vents that are still there today. The bridge over the canal is there as well. 1911 further confirms my view that these are the buildings that make up today’s Flat-Wire Mill, but the possibility remains that the building with the cupolas survives from an earlier time when this was the tinsmith’s shop, and so I continue to believe it was those tinsmiths who made starlight at the brass works.

PRELIMINARY SCHEDULE OF SLIDE TALKS, 2016:

Jan 28 @ 7 PM - New Britain Industrial Museum (snow date Feb. 4)

Feb 16 @ 7 PM - Woodbury Public Library (snow date, Mar. 1)

Feb 25 @ 6 PM - Ansonia Public Library

   -Throughout March - Photos on exhibit at Silas Bronson Library, Waterbury

Mar 10 @ 6 PM - Silas Bronson Library (snow date, Mar 14)

   -Throughout April - Photos on exhibit at Hagaman Library, East Haven, CT

Apr 27 @  6:30 PM - Hagaman Memorial Library, East haven

November 12 - January, 2017 - Photos on exhibit Minor Public Library, Roxbury

Nov. 12 @    - Minor Public Library, Roxbury, CT

Farrel Yard

PHOTOGRAPHER’S JOURNAL: A moment after it pulls away from the station platform in Ansonia, the northbound train on the Naugatuck line passes beneath the pedestrian bridge of Farrel Machine Company and enters the Farrel yard, where the bridge and buildings (all out of the picture on the left) are casting their shadows. The rear masonry stack marks the American Brass casting shop, where this series began, beside the river. The front masonry stack serves the old “dynamo room” and powerhouse (1911) of the Farrel Machine Company at its northern edge.

The previous two photographs in the series were taken from points on the track between the two bridges. The first faced north; the second faced south. Between those pictures and this lies the heart of the old Farrel Machine company. The two campuses taken together, Farrel and American Brass, are a unique, pre-flood survival, and local residents will be quick to remind visitors of the roles both played in WWII, but the truth is, they were important as far back as the Civil War.

Anyone with a bent for metal will be drawn to the sand elevator rising on the left, a corrugated tin giant with tin stairways and pipe-railings and balconies dangling treacherously from unreachable operation centers and offices high in the elevator tower. One can still trace the old track that ran below the elevator and into the long "coke and sand" storage shed. It first appears on the Ansonia maps in 1890, but the bridge from it doesn’t appear until 1895.

The bridge across the track is two stories high and enters the eastern sheds of Farrel near their midpoint. Half the length of the bridge is hidden in this picture. It continues an equal distance across the roofs of three rows of work sheds before reaching the giant foundry, perched a level higher on the hill. There, the sand was used to make molds for casting giant machine parts.The foundry was built between 1884 and 1890.  Once the old Ansonia Canal ran along the North Main Street edge of the Farrel Foundry, between the foundry and Main Street. 

Inside the three rows of sheds, a half dozen architectural styles, at least, tell of the incremental adaptations by which Farrel grew and changed. The first of these sheds appears on the 1900 map. At some point the pedestrian level of the bridge where it crossed the lower sheds was removed to allow for increased ceiling clearances in the sheds below. In another place an interior wall was once the fine masonry facade of the pre-1900 shed. 

Perhaps the most curious feature of the Farrel Yard is the rustic green, wooden structure that seems to upset the geometries of the place. It is not just a wall set a-kilter to shelter trains that once entered at the first opening; it is that a whole shed has been set at an angle that produces difficult to utilize corners where it bumps against the sheds of the  foundry section. A second large opening permits an old road to run beside the angled shed, as the road climbs the hill to Main Street. It’s not a surprise to discover much of this angled section and probably the green wooden facade were already in place on the 1884 map of Ansonia. These are the most ancient geometries that crept toward where the trains had been passing since 1849.

Arriving, Ansonia

PHOTOGRAPHER’S JOURNAL: I’ve stepped through the opening in the chain link fence in yesterday’s photo and turned 180 degrees to look down the rails the other way. 

The track passes under two bridges that unite multiple buildings of the Farrel Machine Company. Anson Phelps, who established the brass and copper mills that became American Brass in Ansonia (from whose property this picture is taken) hired millwright Almon Farrel to dig the mile-and-a-quarter canal that powered the industrial village that Anson Phelps named, "Ansonia.” Afterward, Farrel began his own mill in Anson Phelps’ Ansonia. About that time the railroad came through.

Through the chain link on the left can be read the name, “Farrel Birmingham.” The windows line the first of seven parallel rows of sheds where Farrel machinists cast and finished machine parts for some of the largest factory equipment of the 19th and 20th centuries. The high windows, that project over the track, lie just where the famous, “tunnel,” beneath Farrel work sheds emerges (a public right-of-way, I understand); the road runs on beside the track.

The near bridge is two stories high and connects the Farrel Foundry at the top of the hill to the tall, tin sand elevator (the most distinctive single "architectural" relic of Naugatuck Valley industry) and to the shed below where Farrel Foundry stored sand for molds. The bottom level of the bridge was for pedestrians. The top level is a crane-way for the crane that moved materials between the train siding and the foundry. The crane and much more is intact.

Near the back, the irrepressible Ansonia Opera House, an early work of Robert Wakeman Hill shows off its crisply detailed cornice. It is matched by an energetic facade on Main Street - a gem of a building! It is a relic of what Ansonia once was. Just beyond the Opera House the train arrives at the Ansonia station platform beside gray flood walls.