In my newly-released piece, “West Beach Rugged”, the morning sun climbs through heavy, humid air and feathery clouds, ushering in one of the final days of summer along the Connecticut coast. Gentle waves lap at a sandy seashore nearby, breaking upon scattered boulders encrusted with barnacles and seaweed.
The unseasonably warm weather we’ve been having so far this March has me daydreaming about warm beaches already, but I’m sure we’ll get a reality check soon enough!
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Over the next couple weeks, I’m going to be processing all of my latest work from Aquidneck Island in Narragansett Bay. Much of my shooting time was spent at the beautiful Castle Hill Lighthouse on the southwest coast of Newport, but I also managed to work in Boyd’s Windmill.
Here’s a piece from that windmill which I was eager to develop ahead of the others. The title, “Simplicity”, really says it all. Between the silhouetted windmill vanes and the rich tones in the sky, the uncomplicated beauty encompassed in this piece resonated strongly with my first-hand impression of the windmill.
For the curious, Boyd’s Windmill was built just north of Newport in 1810 and harnessed the ocean breeze to grind grain for surrounding farmers.
Keep an eye out for more work from the Rhode Island coast over the upcoming months!
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Rolling hills bristling with apple trees are immersed in shadow as sunlight gently begins to slip from the Connecticut Valley. Snows from a recent storm cling stubbornly to a nearby hillside and the sky is smudged with swirling color as clouds drift overhead.
For a few reasons which I won’t discuss right now, I’ve generally refrained from naming the specific farms that are seen in my Yankee Farmlands project. But Lyman Orchards, which encompasses the apple trees seen in this piece and more than 1,000 surrounding acres, is truly deserving of some special attention.
This orchard is so old, it actually predates the United States. That’s right: it began on a modest 32 acres back in 1741, decades before the American Revolution. As if that alone isn’t fairly impressive, consider that the 275-year-old Lyman Orchards has been owned and operated by the Lyman Family since the very beginning. Today’s eighth-generation owners are hopeful that a ninth-generation of Lymans will step forward to continue this remarkable legacy well into the 21st century.
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A jacket of snow-dusted ice clings to shallow boulders along the banks of the Housatonic River in Connecticut’s Northwest Hills. Further upstream, against a backdrop of foggy woodlands and steep hills, a long covered bridge faithfully spans the frigid gorge.
At more than 170 feet in length, the West Cornwall Covered Bridge is arguably the most impressive bridge of its type left in Connecticut. Given the cost of maintenance and increasingly heavier loads it was forced to endure since the mid-1800s, it’s nothing short of a miracle that the bridge has survived to the present day.
There were low points along the way, of course. In 1945, a tanker truck broke through the bridge floor and crashed into the river below. A couple decades later in the late 60s, state officials contemplated tearing it down, but were met with vehement opposition from the surrounding community. Instead, it was reinforced with carefully-hidden steel underpinnings, ensuring the bridge would stick around for several more generations to come. The project was a marvelous success, even earning Connecticut an award from the Federal Highway Administration for exemplary historic preservation.
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Winter snows descend upon the farmlands of Northern Connecticut, blanketing hay wagons and a time-worn pasture shelter. Bare shade trees dot the landscape beyond, eventually giving way to the hazy silhouette of distant woodlands.
At first glance, snow-laden farms may seem rather dormant: tractors sit parked, fields lay barren and barns slumber away the winter. But historically, tireless New Englanders found ways to keep busy on the farm even during the colder months of the year.
With no fields to tend, farmers set off into their woodlots to fell trees which would eventually be used in the springtime to build and repair barns, fences and sheds. Seems like a terrible time for such strenuous outdoor labor, right? Maybe so, but there was an important advantage to this approach: it was far easier to haul heavy timber back to the farm on a sled over the snow than it would be to overload the frame and wheels of a creaky, old wooden cart in the summertime.
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In “Luminous Collinsville” (photo at top), just one the pieces I recently released featuring the historic Collins Ax Factory, mist rises from the Farmington River as it courses through old mill dams in the post-industrial factory town of Collinsville, Connecticut. Stricken by days of brutally cold winter weather, waters behind the spillway are glazed over with ice and snow-capped bedrock punctuates the river below.
When the Collins Ax Factory opened as a modest mill on the banks of the Farmington River in the 1820s, nobody could’ve predicted the remarkable success that lay ahead. Over the next century, as its fame grew and business soared, the company expanded its facilities at the site, brought in rail lines, built bridges over the river, constructed extensive dams for waterwheels and hydroelectric plants and served as the hub for a community that is still called “Collinsville” to this day. My piece, “Factory Town, Autumn Hush” (above), portrays the main factory building beside a large mill pond.
But even this industrial giant wasn’t immune to changing times. First came the advent of the chainsaw, which diminished the demand for axes. Market competition steadily increased right up until 1955 when a massive flood made matters worse by destroying the rail lines that serviced the sprawling complex. By the 1960s the factory was shuttered, ending a 140-year legacy of continuous operation that turned out millions of the finest axes and machetes that money could buy.
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The moon crests over drifting clouds as night falls on a frigid tobacco farm in the Connecticut Valley. Dormant fields, still months from being planted in the spring, spread far beyond a nearby curing shed clad in worn, mismatched boards.
The town of Windsor, which flanks the western side of the Connecticut River in the northern reaches of the state, represents a particularly unique blend of rural and developed landscapes. Turn the clock back about a century and you would find the area covered over with vast tobacco fields stretching to the horizon in every direction. Once the tobacco market began to steadily decline after the early 1900s, farmers gradually sold off large swaths of surplus cropland.
This gradual shift in land use has resulted in remaining tobacco farms being tightly intermingled with busy roads, corporate office parks and neighborhoods, maintaining an unmistakable presence in the community and hearkening back to earlier days.
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Beneath pastel skies streaked with soft clouds, the waters of Long Island Sound gently rap at tidal flats and salt grasses of Old Greenwich. To the east, further stretches of the Connecticut coast loom on the horizon against the sublime glow of morning twilight.
Indigenous people of the Asamuck and Patomuck tribes gave this low-lying peninsula on the west end of Long Island Sound its earliest name: “Monakewego”. If the 17th-century settlers of the Connecticut Colony once knew what that term meant, any record has been lost over the centuries. Throughout the 1700s and early 1800s, the spit of land was part and parcel to a modest community at what is today known as Old Greenwich.
Throughout those early days, it would’ve been hard to imagine that the influence of New York City, some 20 miles to the west, would eventually swell to such immense proportions that the coastal town of Greenwich and the rest of Connecticut’s Fairfield County would become one of the most affluent places in the nation.
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Fences weave through a rock-strewn pasture in the northwest of Connecticut, converging at the crest of the nearby hill crowned with barns and silos. Clouds marble the blue sky overhead, fanning out over the dairy farm and the distant, wooded hills.
“Stones… Connecticut’s state flower!” As a child, I always had a laugh whenever my father related that classic New England joke. Of course, as I grew older and began trying to dig or drive rebar on my own property, the state’s characteristic rocky soil ceased to be a laughing matter. That was especially the case for many Connecticut farmers in earlier times: they toiled endlessly with the burdensome task of hauling stone out of their fields.
For that very reason, agricultural pursuits in particularly rugged areas of the state always tended towards livestock. Since the pastureland used for raising dairy cattle or sheep didn’t have to be plowed, it didn’t demand nearly as much meticulous stone removal.
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In my latest release, “Fields ‘neath Talcott” (above), long shadows cast from surrounding woodlands reach across rows of corn as the sun sinks low in the sky, signaling the conclusion of a balmy, autumn day. On the horizon, Talcott Mountain rises nearly 1,000 feet from the surrounding countryside; the iconic Hublein Tower crowns the ridge crest, an unmistakable fleck against bold clouds, forest and traprock cliffs.
In 1823, Encyclopedia Britannica summed up Connecticut as “generally broken land made up of mountains, hills and valleys”. Among the rugged features of this landscape is the Metacomet Range, a distinctive chain of long, sheer ridges that weave through the Connecticut Valley.
Talcott Mountain is just one of many prominent summits of the Metacomet Range, which begins near the Connecticut coast and traces a rocky path north for 100 miles up into northern Massachusetts. Some of the more colorfully named mountains in Connecticut’s length of the chain include Sleeping Giant in Hamden and Wallingford, Meriden’s Hanging Hills and the Barndoor Hills in Granby.
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Cast from the lustrous, hazy sky above, sunlight floods a frigid, snow-laden field in the Connecticut River Valley and throws long shadows from the stubble of last season’s corn stalks.
Although modern-day Enfield lies in the northernmost reaches of Connecticut on the east side of the Connecticut River, that wasn’t always the case. An early survey conducted in 1642, just as colonists were beginning to gain a foothold in New England, determined that Enfield was part of the neighboring Massachusetts Colony.
More than five decades later in 1695, a new survey determined that the old boundary between Massachusetts and Connecticut was entirely incorrect. Enfield and a handful of other towns, which had been part of Massachusetts for two generations, were actually part of Connecticut! Things moved slowly in those early days, though: it would take another 50 years before Enfield managed to officially secede from Massachusetts and join the Connecticut Colony in 1750.
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In my newly released piece, “Driftwood Surge”, whitewater erupts from a length of stranded driftwood as waves crash upon sandy beaches along the eastern Connecticut coast. A bare tree, perched upon the bluffs at the horizon, stands as the only indication that colder weather has descended upon this otherwise lovely shoreline park.
In an issue published in 1911, Country Life Magazine reflected on the virtues of Long Island Sound with a contagious enthusiasm. “Its edges are indented with numerous cosy harbors at convenient intervals, and fringed in some parts with many pleasant islands,” the author noted. “One of its harbors can hardly find a parallel in the world for beauty and charm; one of its estuaries has been said many times to surpass, not in rugged grandeur but in grace and soft beauty, both the Rhine and the Hudson.”
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