With this unseasonably warm weather, it may not feel quite like December here in New England… but things are looking beautiful nonetheless!
As I was headed out to New Preston for a shoot in the early morning a few days ago, I noticed all of the beautiful, lighted storefronts lining the town green in Litchfield. Although I didn’t have much time to spare if I was going to get to my destination before dawn, I simply had to stop and work with a few compositions. I was so pleased to review the results later in the day; the warm feel of this decorated streets certainly embodies some of the more nuanced feelings of that elusive “Christmas spirit”.
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Heavy fog engulfs the orchards of Central Connecticut during a curious warm streak in mid-December. Rows of slumbering peach trees recede into the distance, eventually rendered in silhouette with pines and bare hardwoods at the grove’s edge.
Peaches were introduced by European settlers throughout much of the Mid-Atlantic and Southern colonies in the New World as early as the 1600s. “In fact,” recalled one 19th-century author,“ peaches were growing so widely in eastern North America by the time of the American Revolution that many assumed the fruit to be an American native.”
New England was a bit slower to truly embrace the peach, instead relying heavily upon apple and pear trees which could better tolerate the harsh northern climate. While scatterings of peach trees may have been planted here or there for a century or more prior, commercial-scale peach orchards in Connecticut didn’t emerge until the early 1900s.
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Ethereal mist rises from the deep, rolling hills of the Housatonic River Valley as autumn tightens its grip upon the dark forests.
Bristling with wooded mountains and carved by scenic valleys, the northwest of Connecticut is perhaps an unlikely vestige of remote –even romantic– natural splendor in an otherwise crowded state which is increasingly consumed by the sprawl of civilization.
Connecticut’s Northwest Hills weren’t always so quiet, though. Mills and factories once clustered along its rushing rivers, iron ore was wrested from its mountains, vast forests were felled to fuel blast furnaces and make way for pastureland. But over the last two centuries or so, most of those industries vanished and agriculture deeply declined. Nature was obliged to beautify the resulting vacancies and did so with masterful skill.
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Cold winds of December rake through acres of Christmas trees and howl as they reach the distant woodlands. Across the countryside, the setting sun casts rich, molten light which imparts the illusion of warmth in a land that aches for snow.
The custom of decorating Christmas trees was originally brought to North America by German settlers in the 1700s, but didn’t really begin catching on until the mid-1800s. By 1901, the first Christmas tree farm in the USA was established, though it was a rarity in its day. In fact, nine out of every ten Christmas trees were cut from forests right up until the 50s. That changed dramatically over the past several decades as tree plantations rapidly expanded; now almost all Christmas trees are farm-grown.
Many different evergreens such as firs, spruces and pines may be cultivated for use as Christmas trees and an 8-foot specimen generally grows in 6 to 10 years. Farmers oftentimes plant new trees every year or two, ensuring that a new generation is reaching maturity every December. The trees seen on this plantation are of mixed heights –between 2 to 4 feet– so it will likely be another couple years before any of them are ready to be harvested and decorated.
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Swollen with autumn rainfall, the Yantic River slips beneath century-old bridges in the historic district of Norwich before careening furiously over a broad, 140-foot-wide shelf of jagged rock (see “Falls of Norwich” above). A peaceful stillness embraces the riverside foliage, which glistens delicately with raindrops in spite of the roaring spectacle nearby.
Known formally as Yantic Falls, this cataract has also been referred to as “Indian Leap” for centuries, a name which hearkens back to an ancient battle between rival Native American tribes of Southern New England.
The year was 1643. After losing a brief skirmish, Narragansett warriors of Rhode Island found themselves retreating through unfamiliar territory in Norwich with victorious Mohegan fighters in pursuit. One doomed band of Narragansetts emerged from the forest only to be met by the sheer cliffs at Yantic Falls. There was no escape, but rather than be captured by the Mohegans, the warriors cast themselves to their deaths in the river below.
That stands as the most convincing and probable story behind the name “Indian Leap”. A more fantastic variation of the tale goes on to tell that the leading men of both tribes managed to jump the gorge and continue the chase on the other side. Since the narrowest parts of the ravine are nearly 40 feet across –an impossible leap even for modern Olympians– it’s likely that this addition to the story is pure fiction.
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Bare forests line the margin of a muddy field in the Farmington River Valley as autumn deepens, bringing colder temperatures and even occasional frosts. Cabbage crops, still verdant and thriving under the setting sun, stand as an unlikely contradiction in the otherwise stark, sleepy landscape.
By early November, most crops in New England have been harvested and the fields laid bare. Farms that were bristling with corn, tomatoes, squash and other crops just months earlier become dormant expanses of open land.
Persistent “autumn cabbages” are among the rare exceptions, though. Resilient and cold-hardy, these white and red cabbage varieties continue to grow and yield under conditions that might seem incredible to those who are unfamiliar with the vegetable’s durability. In this piece, we find a row which has just recently been harvested amidst other plants that continue to mature.
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Be sure to check out more work from my Yankee Farmlands project, an on-going journey through the farmlands of Connecticut in celebration of New England’s agricultural heritage.
When it was announced in late 2014 that Connecticut would be creating a new state park, I was all ears. After all, Connecticut’s diverse state parks are a treasure trove of publicly-accessible scenery which figure very prominently in my body of work. What I couldn’t have imagined was that this latest addition to the park system was, seemingly against all odds, a seashore park of more than 30 acres!
Dubbed “Seaside State Park”, this rocky stretch of beach where Long Island Sound laps at the Waterford mainland stands as the first new state-owned park along the Connecticut coast in more than two generations! That’s a big deal, folks, and I’ve been eager to experience this new place first-hand. As it would happen, it took more than a year before I finally stepped foot in the sand at Seaside State Park, but my visit earlier this month assured me that this unique landscape is a fitting addition to a state park system that boasts a marvelous range of variety. While you absorb my new work from Seaside, I invite you along to explore the origins and folklore behind this storied place.
If the creation of a new coastal state park in Connecticut is novel and a bit unusual in this day in age, then perhaps its a fitting installment in the equally novel and unusual history of Seaside State Park. While the crashing waves and panoramic views of the Sound rank high on the draws of this park, one cannot help but notice the massive, abandoned sanatorium that stands sentinel on higher ground just a stone’s throw from the water (see “Dunes and Echoes” above). The derelict building is at once beautiful and foreboding, its vacant windows peering out over the water from a gothic edifice which bears an eerie resemblance to the prototypical haunted mansion.
Known as “The Seaside” when it was constructed in the early 1930s on a magnificent beachfront in Waterford, the sanatorium would serve as Connecticut’s much-needed facility for treating children afflicted by tuberculosis. A noble cause for certain, but one which the medical knowledge of that era was ill-quipped to serve.
The treatment being administered was known as heliotherapy and consisted of little more than ensuring that the disease-stricken children got several hours of exposure to sunlight and fresh air each day. Coastal environments, of course, were the ideal place for such a treatment regimen. But while heliotherapy may certainly have succeeded in improving the morale of the young patients, it did next to nothing in the way of curing the terrible disease or significantly improving outcomes.
Thankfully, by the late 1940s, an antibiotic was developed which finally gave the medical community an effective tool to combat and cure tuberculosis. As the use of this revolutionary new medicine spread, mortality rates dropped off dramatically. The old concept of heliotherapy was abandoned and The Seaside sanatorium ceased to be medically relevant. The last tuberculosis patients to walk through its doors left in 1958.
The building was quickly repurposed as a healthcare center for the elderly, a provisional use which would last only a handful of years. It was converted to the Seaside Regional Center for the Mentally Retarded in 1961 and would go on to house and treat patients with intellectual disabilities right up into the 90s.
Popular folklore suggests that this final appropriation of The Seaside was concluded in 1996 when it was quietly decided by state officials that decades of terrifying patient abuse and a peculiarly high mortality rate among its residents simply had to be stopped. Yet, after conducting my own cursory research, I’ve come to the conclusion that these claims are likely to be false or, at best, wild exaggerations. It is true that, in the early 1970s, some current and former staff members claimed that the facility superintendent, Fred Finn, was mismanaging funds and abusing patients. Eleven employees of the facility testified against him at an official hearing. But the matter was complicated by the fact that many facility employees vouched for Finn; even the parents of many patients supported him, insisting that he was doing an excellent job. The official investigation considered the evidence and ultimately cleared the superintendent of all allegations.
And while we can speculate as to whether or not Finn was really innocent, the fact remains that this seems to have been the only real scandal involving The Seaside during more than 35 years of otherwise satisfactory operation as a mental health facility. Its closure in 1996 had nothing to do with sinister activity, but was instead the result of layoffs and budget cuts as the governor shifted the focus of mental health care from regional institutions to community-based solutions. So where did all of these stories of terrorized patients and staggering death tolls come from? Well, I guess that every “haunted sanatorium” needs a scary story, even if that story needs to be mostly fabricated. The vast majority of deaths at the facility occurred during its earlier use with tuberculosis-afflicted children who were claimed by a terrible and largely incurable disease; far from being abusive, doctors of that era were doing everything they possibly could.
You may remember that I described The Seaside earlier as both beautiful and foreboding. It’s beauty, in particular, is a point of great concern among those who feel that the crumbling building ought to be preserved in one way or another as part of this new state park’s development. The architect was none other than Cass Gilbert, a fairly famous individual whose designs include the prestigious G. Fox Building in Hartford, Connecticut and even the US Supreme Court Building in Washington, D.C. While The Seaside may not have been among his more famous creations, it certainly bears his characteristic refinement and attention to detail. But with the buildings having sat unused for almost 20 years now, its difficult to say if a rehabilitation project is feasible or cost-prohibitive.
As yet, no firm plan has been established for how Seaside State Park will be developed in the coming years. The fate of the old sanatorium is just as uncertain as that of the earliest tuberculosis patients that it housed so long ago. But the seashore itself is, and will probably remain, much like it has been from the beginning. As the waters faithfully rap away at rock jetties during sunrise, its easy to be lulled into a contemplative tranquility by the uncomplicated beauty of The Sound. But we must not forget the droves of unfortunate souls who once called The Seaside home. These were the reassuring summertime vistas to which they arose in the morning… this was the tempestuous coast whose storms sometimes kept them awake at night. For some 60 years, this place was the abode of those who were dealt a rough hand; most have been forgotten, but they remain bound up in these sands and waters and their stories are whispered in the hush between breaking waves.
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Parched maple leaves blanket the forest floor, rustling amidst an old fieldstone wall which has been toppled by more than a century of fallen trees and frost-heave. Fiery autumn light erupts through the woodland canopy before us, awakening the landscape to a pleasant warmth that grows ever-scarcer as the season wanes.
Fieldstone walls such as this one generally date back to the 1800s. Tens of thousands of miles of them criss-crossed the landscape in that era as the stony soil of New England farms was laboriously combed free of rocks. But why would a farmer have built a stone wall in the woods, as we see here?
It may be hard to believe, but this stone wall is far older than the surrounding forest. Had we stood in this very spot in the 1860s, for instance, we probably would’ve looked beyond this wall to see open pastureland stretching to the horizon. The woods that we see now wouldn’t even have sprouted until decades later as agriculture declined and expansive farmlands were abandoned to the hand of nature. These days, Connecticut is host to roughly 3,000 square miles of forest which feels as old as time itself, yet most of it began growing on deserted farmland little more than 150 years ago.
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Contact J. G. Coleman to buy a beautiful fine art print of “Sylvan Divine” or inquire about licensing this image.
Long shadows reach across the landscape as the sun sits low upon the horizon in Connecticut’s Farmington Valley. Nestled among the shadows and vivid foliage of shade trees, a barn hoists its tall weather vane into the air atop a stately cupola.
For the first two centuries after European settlement, farmers in New England sided their barns with a single layer of long boards. This kept out rain and snow, but the narrow gaps between each board meant that the barn interior was still rather drafty. Livestock housed within needed to eat plenty of food in order to stay warm in spite of the chills. So, in the spirit of efficiency, 19th-century farmers began trying to seal the sides of their barns with shingles or additional boards, letting in less cold air so that livestock would consume less feed in the wintertime.
It worked, but there was one glaring problem: those gaps had served as much-needed barn ventilation. Without any air circulation, manure fumes grew overwhelming and the excess humidity caused rampant mold growth. Simple cupolas solved the problem, venting stale, damp air through the roof. By the late 1800s, intricate cupola designs emerged which were just as beautiful as they were functional.
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Be sure to check out more work from my Yankee Farmlands project, an on-going journey through the farmlands of Connecticut in celebration of New England’s agricultural heritage.
The Housatonic Valley awakens to a chilly autumn morning as sunlight dapples the brilliant woodland canopy in the distance. Before us, cornstalks rise defiantly from a field besieged by frost; an unmistakable chill in the air foreshadows the coming winter.
But when it comes to cold New England weather, the chill in “Yankee Farmlands № 42” (above) and even the most brutal winters of the past decades can’t begin to compare to the disastrous chills of 1816… a time which would come to be remembered as the “Year Without a Summer”. Freezes killed the fruit tree blossoms in May. Come June, there were still reports of snowfall and slabs of ice drifted steadily down the Connecticut River. Frosts persisted well into August. By September, a reverend in Northern Connecticut lamented in his journal that “no person living has known so poor a crop of corn in New England… as now.” Famine engulfed the American Northeast when it became clear that there would be no harvest.
At the time, nobody could explain this perplexing weather: a day of frost in June might be followed by a day of seasonably sweltering heat, just to be followed yet again by a day of snowfall! Scientists now believe that a volcanic eruption in Indonesia had cast massive plumes of dust and ash into the Earth’s atmosphere which periodically blotted out the sunlight and caused the bewildering conditions.
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Bull’s Bridge, one of Connecticut’s few remaining historical covered bridges, is seen in my new piece (above) during a radiant sunrise as it weathers autumn for the 173rd time since it was constructed in the mid-1800s. But long before the current Bull’s Bridge was built –at a time when the trees that would eventually produce its heavy lumber were still just spindly saplings– the colonists of Connecticut had already been raising bridges at this spot on the Housatonic River. The first on record was constructed in the 1760s by the industrious Bull family in order to transport iron to New York from their Connecticut foundry.
I have visited Bull’s Bridge on numerous occasions over the past years, very much taken with the heritage bound up in this place and the striking beauty along this run of the Housatonic River. Of course, I am forever seeking new ways to interpret and express these qualities… striving to craft imagery that encompasses my own impressions of this centuries-old river crossing. “Autumn at Bull’s Crossing” is my latest interpretation, produced this October, and I felt very strongly about this piece from the moment that I visualized the composition and set to framing it up.
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Autumn advances upon Connecticut’s Eastern Uplands where horses huddle beside one another amidst a pasture strewn with fallen leaves. A creaky, old farmhouse nearby sits in shadowy repose beneath a towering shade tree, whispering forgotten tales of times long past through fissures in its frail siding.
Connecticut’s scattered farming districts may not be as numerous as they once were, but those places where agriculture does persist have often been worked almost continuously for centuries. Consequently, it’s not uncommon on these farms to find a mingling of barns, outbuildings and silos of wildly different ages, each constructed at different times over the course of several generations.
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