“Eightmile Crossing” Covered bridge at Southford Falls State Park, Southbury & Oxford, Connecticut
Even as woodlands along Eightmile Brook grow increasingly bare by late October, the river gorge remains lively as ever with exuberant cascades singing away in the shadow of a covered bridge above.
Although dozens of covered bridges could be found throughout Connecticut during the 19th-century, most have long since been lost to floods, fires, wear and tear and changing technology that had rendered the venerable timber bridges largely obsolete more than a century ago. Only three covered bridges built before 1900 are left in Connecticut these days, each of which has become a beloved icon in its host town. But while historical covered bridges may be few and far between in Connecticut, there’s also a handful of covered bridges dotting the state which were built later, from the 1950s and onward.
Unlike their antique forebears, these relatively new covered bridges were never really intended to be trafficked crossings, but rather carefully crafted replicas that recall New England’s early days. Take the covered bridge in “Eightmile Crossing”, for example: although it uses the authentic Burr Arch truss design patented in 1817, it wasn’t actually built over Southford Falls until 1972.
Purchase a Fine Art Print or Inquire About Licensing
“Daybreak at Chauncey Cliffs” Chauncey Peak at Giuffrida Park, Meriden, Connecticut
Gusting winds rock a cluster of cedars dauntlessly perched atop an ancient traprock cliff in the Metacomet Range. In the valley below, the outskirts of Meriden are eased from their twilight slumber as dawn banishes a blanket of morning fog.
Originally known as Meriden Farm when it was settled by hard-scrabble pioneers from the Connecticut Colony in the mid-1600s, Meriden has managed over the intervening centuries to swell from a remote, agrarian outpost to a city of more than 60,000. Industry flourished there during the Gilded Age and beyond, especially in the form of silver manufacturing, earning Meriden the nickname “Silver City”. The handle persists to this day, even long after the old factories were shuttered.
But if The Silver City isn’t really notable for its silver any longer, it’s certainly a veritable gold mine of municipal parkland. Almost 18% of Meriden’s landscape is contained within city parks and, as the literature explains, “no other city in New England can match that percentage!” Central among those parks are Meriden’s traprock ridges, characterized by precipitous cliffs which tower over the surrounding valleys and dominate the city’s horizon. I produced “Daybreak at Chauncey Cliffs” from the summit of the 700-foot Chauncey Peak which rises from woodlands in the northeastern reaches of the city.
Purchase a Fine Art Print or Inquire About Licensing
“A Serpent Awakened” Gorge Cascade Falls, Sleeping Giant State Park, Hamden, Connecticut
In the autumn forests of Hamden along the flank of the Sleeping Giant hills, a cascading stream boils fiercely with whitewater as it surges around a bend at the bottom of a leaf-scattered gorge.
When a client asked me last year about Gorge Cascade Falls, a mingling of waterfalls and cascades along a nameless brook at Sleeping Giant State Park, I gave my honest answer: Sleeping Giant is an incredible state park for its extensive trails and mountaintop vistas, but it’s just not a waterfall destination.
I still stand by that assessment, as the stream is starved for water most of the year and the “falls” can nearly dry up during summertime droughts. But in those rare cases when, for example, an October Nor’easter dumps 5 inches of rain in a day, even this little kitten of a waterfall enjoys a few days of roaring like a lion.
Purchase a Fine Art Print or Inquire About Licensing
A grove of pines stand shrouded with morning mist on the tranquil shores of Wigwam Reservoir, their towering trunks inverted in a mirror-like reflection upon the still water below.
While the Greater Hartford region and its thirst for water spawned such magnificent creations as the Barkhamsted Reservoir, several other cities elsewhere in Connecticut were similarly tasked around the turn of the 19th century with determining how they would bring sufficient water to their burgeoning populations. Waterbury, for example, is supplied by a system of five generous reservoirs, the first of which was Wigwam Reservoir up north in Thomaston on a tributary of the Naugatuck River.
Construction of Wigwam Reservoir began in 1893 with the clearing of land and preliminary dam work. A pipeline measuring three feet in diameter was routed about 10 miles to Waterbury the next year and, by 1896, water was flowing. It wasn’t until 1901 that the dam was finally built up to its full height, inundating the hundred-acre basin of Wigwam Reservoir with more than 700 million gallons of water.
Purchase a Fine Art Print or Inquire About Licensing
“Woodland Remembrance” Alice Newton Street Memorial Park, Woodbridge, Connecticut
In my newly-released piece, “Woodland Remembrance”, sunlight pierces the forest canopy in the heart of Woodbridge, transforming the understory into a blissfully verdant landscape fit for a fairytale.
Although Connecticut began building its state park system in the mid-1910s and town-owned parks had existed far earlier, nature preserves owned for the public good outside the realm of government were generally a slightly later phenomenon.
The Woodbridge Park Association, operating independently of Woodbridge’s town government, was among the earliest organizations in Connecticut to acquire and manage preserved land on a not-for-profit basis. The Association got its start back in 1928 when it was founded in order to fulfill the vision of philanphropist Newton Street who had decided to forever preserve over 80 acres of land in memory of his mother, Alice Street. The result, featured in this latest piece of mine, was the Alice Newton Street Memorial Park.
Purchase a Fine Art Print or Inquire About Licensing
A breath-taking vista, wrought in endless peaks and valleys and lined with wild forests, unfolds before the humble front porch of a rustic, old cabin nestled amidst Vermont’s Green Mountains.
I produced my latest release atop the 2,400-foot Hogback Mountain, a majestic overlook in Southern Vermont fittingly dubbed the “100-Mile View” which peers deeply into the neighboring mountainscapes of Massachusetts and New Hampshire.
Purchase a Fine Art Print or Inquire About Licensing
Barns nestle into the bottom of a broad ridge in Northern Connecticut, the adjacent pastures already thick with grasses by early May. Woodlands on the hillside have taken to “greening over” as recent rains nourish buds and emerging leaves.
In modern times, Canton is a prosperous township of nearly 9,000 in the Farmington River Valley. Even as early as the mid-1800s, the renowned Collinsville ax factory brought growth and industrial might in the southern reaches of the town.
But the earliest settlers of Canton, said to have arrived there in the 1740s, didn’t fare quite so well. So toilsome were their efforts at building a life in this hilly, wooded frontier that they saw fit to name their founding village “Suffrage”. One can only imagine that, for these struggling pioneers, a time when their hamlet would enjoy comfort and convenience seemed impossibly distant.
Purchase a Fine Art Print or Inquire About Licensing
Remote woodlands of Central Connecticut emerge from the grip of winter, channeling fresh spring rains through a sprightly brook which tumbles through the hills. The forest floor is obscured beneath a dense blanket of leaf litter, remnants of last autumn that have only recently thawed after several frigid months bound up in ice and buried by snow.
Depending on whose metric we use, there are anywhere from a dozen to as many as a hundred waterfalls in Connecticut. But because so much of the state is criss-crossed by roads, most of them are can be seen with a fairly short walk from the blacktop. Some are even visible without leaving the roadside.
“The Cascade”, a 15-foot horsetail on Carr Brook, is among the few that aren’t quite so easy to reach. This waterfall demands a ¾-mile drive down an old dirt logging road, then a mile long hike through the hills.
Purchase a Fine Art Print or Inquire About Licensing
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.
Purchase a Fine Art Print or Inquire About Licensing
Contact J. G. Coleman to buy a beautiful fine art print of “Sylvan Divine” or inquire about licensing this image.
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.
Purchase a Fine Art Print or Inquire About Licensing
My new release from the Brian E. Tierney Preserve, “Tierney Springtime”, brings you into the wooded hills of Roxbury in Western Connecticut. Jack’s Brook, a lively tributary of the Shepaug River, is found snaking through a rock-strewn glen in the faint morning twilight as broad, verdant leaves of riverside skunk cabbage jostle in the breeze.
Although the lush greenery of skunk cabbage is a refreshing sign of spring, anybody that has traipsed through patches of this plant in the wetlands as a child is all too familiar with the potent stench of its sap. That foul odor, not surprisingly, inspired the comparison to the rank odor unleashed by frightened skunks. Luckily, the stench of skunk cabbage isn’t quite as noxious and doesn’t linger nearly as long as that of an actual skunk, but it’s unpleasant just the same.
In spite of its unfortunate reputation, eastern skunk cabbage is actually a quite remarkable plant which is expertly adapted to the climatic extremes of New England. Beginning as early as January and February, the mottled flower hoods of skunk cabbage can be found melting through the snow and ice on their wetland habitat. That’s right: skunk cabbage is one of the rare plants that is able to generate it’s own heat, sometimes in excess of 20° to 30°F above that of the surrounding air. This incredible ability affords it the opportunity to push its flowers up in late winter in order to draw pollinating insects before its competitors have so much as sprouted. And believe it or not, even that offensive odor serves a very clever purpose. Since the smell roughly resembles that of rotting plants and animals, it attracts flies and similar insects that emerge very early in the year and pollinate the flowers of the skunk cabbage.
But truth be told, finding this natural garden of springtime foliage was actually just a welcome bonus along the route to my planned destination. The sight that had drawn me out to Tierney Preserve to begin with was a waterfall locally known as The Cascades which was mentioned in Russell Dunn’s book, Connecticut Waterfalls: A Guide. He had opted to prepend that generic name with the name of the brook upon which the 15-foot falls are formed, thus making them Jack’s Brook Cascades. You can see this waterfall in my new piece, “The Falls at Tierney” (above), where they weave through a rocky, woodland gorge in the faint morning light filtering down through the springtime canopy.
From a purely technical perspective, the waterfall really is more of a steep, spirited cascade. But I can understand why Dunn included it in his waterfall guide, since Jack’s Brook Cascades are every bit a waterfall by aesthetic standards. That is to say, it simply feels like a waterfall. Suffice it to say, you can expect to see “The Falls at Tierney” added to my ever-growing Waterfalls of Connecticut collection, which I urge you to check out at connecticutfalls.com if you haven’t visited lately. I’ve added a few more waterfalls over the course of the past season, so you’ll probably find something new.
Purchase a Fine Art Print or Inquire About Licensing
