“Spring of the Sedges” Rifle Range Pond in Mattatuck State Forest, Waterbury, Connecticut
April may have melted the ice from these quiet swamplands
amidst the hills north of Connecticut’s Brass City, but the sedges and
woodlands alike still bide their time, laying dormant until springtime manages
to relax the harshness of New England’s elements.
For me, it’s always illuminating to gain a historical perspective of my subject matter; it can even go a long way towards deepening my creative efforts. But the ease with which I’m able to delve into the past varies sharply from one place to the next and, on occasion, I’m a bit surprised to find how little has been written about certain places in Connecticut despite this state’s nearly 400 years of recorded history.
One such case is Rifle Range Pond, a roughly 14-acre expanse of water and wetlands in Mattatuck State Forest which is just barely contained by Waterbury’s northern border. With such a distinctive name, you’d think it shouldn’t be too hard to uncover some sort of insight into it’s past. And yet, I’ve come up empty-handed on this one. The pond doesn’t appear on USGS topographic maps until 1951 and doesn’t even appear with the name “Rifle Range Pond” until 1968. But given its relatively secluded location along Spruce Brook Road, which is devoid of any nearby shooting ranges as far as I can tell, this pond’s backstory remains a mystery for the time being.
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The Jericho Bridge, its weathered girder frame showing all 112 years of its age, spans the shadow-laden waters of the Naugatuck River amidst the wooded hills in Thomaston. Although it’s January in the valley and shelf ice is forming along the river banks, the molten light of dawn imparts the comforting illusion of warmth.
It’s difficult to overstate how big railroads used to be in Connecticut: not just in terms of their sprawl throughout the state, which was impressive, but in terms of the degree to which they dominated transportation. When the Jericho Bridge was built in 1907 to carry a line of the New York, New Haven & Hartford Railroad over the Naugatuck, it was just one, tiny facet of an immense railroad monopoly that would’ve seemed virtually infinite in its influence and power.
And yet, before Jericho Bridge had even a spot of rust, things were to begin slowly changing for the once-untouchable railroad giant. In time, the rise of automobiles and the subsequent development of highways changed the way we traveled, changed the way we transported goods and changed our society, in general. The Golden Age of the Railroad was arguably over by the 1920s and 1930s… though the industry struggled forth even as its eventual demise grew ever more imminent. All the Northeastern railroad titans just slowly fizzled away over decades of steady decline; most were ghosts of their former selves by the 1960s and 1970s, if they hadn’t thrown in the towel altogether. Remarkably, the Jericho Bridge and the Naugatuck line is still active to this day, though I can’t think of a time I’ve ever seen a single car on its tracks.
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In modern times, Cove Island is an inviting, landscaped park with broad grassy expanses, paved walking paths and benches that overlook Long Island Sound. Yet throughout the 19th century, this swath of coastal land was well-known as a place of business, initially hosting a modest grist mill which eventually developed into an industrial complex known as the “Cove Mills.”
But in an era before the electrical grid existed, and without a waterfall to turn a waterwheel or turbine, how could any mills have operated on Cove Island? Along the coast of Rhode Island to the east, it was not uncommon to harness the ocean breeze through the use of wind mills, but that wasn’t the only “alternative” means of operating a mill in New England. The Cove Mills made clever use of the tides with an old and especially ingenious method that extracted energy from the constant surge and withdrawal of seawater at the coast.
Known as a “tide mill” or “tidewater mill”, the Cove Mills employed a dam across the mouth of the Noroton River, positioned at a bottleneck just before it emptied into the sea at Cove Harbor. When the tide came in, generally rising between 6 and 9 feet, it would crest higher than the dam and fill the river basin upstream. When the tide withdrew, it would drop well-below the top of the dam, leaving millions of gallons of water trapped upstream. In this way, the river itself served as the mill pond for the Cove Mills. Water stored in the river after the tide withdrew was funneled from the dam through a sluice, creating an artificial “waterfall” that was harnessed to drive factory machinery. With each rise of the tide, the pond was refilled.
The proverbial Golden Age of the Cove Mills came in the 1890s. At that time, according to The Stamford Historical Society, the complex…
“…employed about 500 workers, with state-of-the-art facilities on 70 acres at the Cove, thousands of feet of mechanized wharves hosting big deep-sea schooners, a shipping company with four schooners, and a number of houses on [nearby] Weed Street.”
But just three decades later, shifts in markets and a corresponding failure on the part of owners to adapt to changing times had led to a dramatic decline of the Cove Mills. The future of the industrial complex as a profitable enterprise was already quite uncertain going into 1919, but by February of that year, it would cease to matter much anyway. A massive fire erupted in the facility on February 19th; by the next morning, the Cove Mills had burnt to the ground, never to be rebuilt.
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According to a 2015 report by the USDA, there’s somewhere in the realm of 806 million trees scattered throughout Connecticut’s forests. Of those, it’s probably safe to say that well over 99% of them are less than 200 years of age, if not significantly younger. Indeed, old-growth forest in the Nutmeg State is exceptionally scarce, limited to a few parcels of oftentimes rough terrain where trees have somehow managed to dodge forest fires, disease, tornadoes and the mighty ax for hundreds of years. But even those old-growth trees tend most often to be 250 to 350 years old. That brings me to the truly ancient white oak tree featured in my newly-released work: the venerable Granby Oak.
Estimated to be as much as 400 to 450 years old, the Granby Oak was likely a healthy sapling at about the time that the Pilgrims were first stepping foot on Cape Cod a hundred miles to the west in 1620. The quiet road in the hills that the tree stands beside today certainly didn’t exist yet. And for that matter, neither did the town of Granby or the Connecticut Colony. The vast and storied history that the Connecticut landscape has accrued since those earliest years before European settlement could fill volumes, and through it all, the Granby Oak has quietly minded its plot of soil… growing ever larger by the decade.
At the time of its last formal assessment, the Granby Oak’s trunk measured more than 20 feet in circumference. It’s grown to be a fairly squat tree, measuring a bit less than 80 feet tall, though this is probably because it sat amidst open farmland for a good deal of its mature years and simply didn’t need to race skywards in an effort to compete for sunlight, as one would expect in a forest environment. Instead of growing upward, the Granby Oak grew outward, its ancient gnarled branches eventually becoming so long and heavy that they came to rest upon the ground like wooden serpents.
Of course, the tree hasn’t exactly enjoyed an easy ride; at times, it’s been a struggle. There’s no doubt that the Granby Oak has endured several dozens of hurricanes and blizzards throughout its years, apparently no worse for the wear. Only in its advanced age does it seem to have weakened somewhat unto the rigors of time and happenstance. In 1997, the plot of land on which the tree stood was nearly sold for development as a home lot, only narrowly escaping that fate when locals thankfully rallied behind the Granby Land Trust to purchase the property instead and preserve the tree so long as it should go on living. But with one crisis averted, others were to follow. The Granby Oak was hit by a truck in 2010 and barely a year later it was mangled by a freak October snowstorm that mercilessly claimed a number of its branches. And yet, somehow, this sylvan relic of Connecticut’s North has managed to persist through it all.
But what lays ahead for the Granby Oak? If we are to consider the range of recorded ages for some of the oldest fallen white oaks in the Eastern United States, the Granby Oak would already seem to have cheated death out of as much as a century. In 2005, cross-dating of a remarkable white oak in Virginia revealed an age of 464 years, easily the most extraordinary specimen on record. And yet, if the Granby Oak’s estimated age is correct, then it’s quickly approaching even the most extreme known boundaries of longevity for the species. Truth be told, while the tree remains apparently healthy and hopefully endures for several more years to come, it seems quite unlikely that another century lays ahead. It stands today as an iconic and wondrous denizen of Connecticut, having outlived virtually all of the billions of trees that existed on the day it sprouted so very long ago. What a grand life it has lead! And going forward.. well… perhaps the conclusion of Connecticut writer Stephen Wood puts it best:
“It has certainly suffered mightily since I first visited. Major limbs have disappeared and others are not long for this world. Everything dies eventually, and when this tree suffers its final fate, we can’t be too sad.”
“Oh, summer has clothed the earth
In a cloak from the loom of the sun!”
—Paul Laurence Dunbar, 1872-1906
Just in case you weren’t keeping track, as of today less than a month separates us from the first day of autumn in 2018. I can’t help but feel as if there’s something especially soothing about these last few weeks of summer. Even as they furtively steal from us minutes of daylight and ticks off the thermometer, they nonetheless invite us to embrace every balmy afternoon and savor every warm breeze. We would do well to accept that invitation, even if there’s a faint restlessness brewing in our soul for those enchanting days of autumn that loom in the not-so-distant future.
“Ah, September! You are the doorway to the season that awakens my soul…
I must confess that I love you only because you
are a prelude to my beloved October.”
—Peggy Toney Horton
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Noah Webster Jr. was born in this very house on South Main Street in West Hartford during October of 1758. In 1806, at age 48, he would go on to create America’s first dictionary and then dedicate the next two decades to crafting his master work: the 70,000-word “An American Dictionary of the English Language”. It sold poorly and production drove him into debt. Only after he died in the 1840s, with the rights to the work purchased by the Merriam brothers, did the famous Merriam-Webster Dictionary take shape, posthumously securing Webster’s rightful place in American history.
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When I’m out shooting in the field, I don’t always know for certain how well a given image is going to “work” once I get it back home and start developing it and reflecting upon how well it does or doesn’t fulfill my creative vision. There are times when I find myself in beautiful environments which simply prove too difficult to commit to a two-dimensional composition in a way that’s faithful to my creative expectations. After all, there are all sorts of sensory experiences that contribute to our experience in the outdoors: birds chirping, changing light, clouds drifting overhead, the sound of breeze rushing through the forest canopy, maybe a brisk autumn chill in the early morning or the impressive quietude during a snowfall. Now, there are techniques that can be leveraged to suggest some these qualities in a purely visual, flat image, but there’s no way to truly reproduce them. And sometimes, when those supporting elements are lost, the visual impression that remains just doesn’t quite convey what I’d hoped it would.
But then again, there are also some outings during which everything comes together beautifully and I know the moment I release the shutter that the imagery I’m producing resonates decisively with my creative vision. “I Dreamt of the Housatonic”, my latest release which I produced last autumn, was created under just those sort of circumstances. When I came by this weathered bench overlooking the Housatonic River and West Cornwall Covered Bridge with soft morning light imparting a gentle glow, it immediately struck me as a golden opportunity.
Having meditated over what drew me so strongly to the scene, it’s tough to pin down any one facet. The image, to me, has a timeless feel that is largely removed from immediate associations with modern life. No cars, no houses with satellite dishes, no joggers in Under Armor, no power lines lazily draped across the river. Putting aside the fact that it’s clearly a modern color photograph, the scene could just as easily have looked almost identical to an observer in 1900 as it did in 2017 (okay, okay… maybe metal road signs weren’t as common back then, but you get my point). And to my sensibilities, that timeless quality also contributes to a somewhat dream-like feel: as if we might find ourselves whisked away in a blissful dream to this quiet bench in the countryside, enjoying the amaranthine solitude of a peaceful, rustic riverscape.
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“Faithful Even Unto Death” Veterans War Memorial Tower atop Mount Greylock, Adams, Massachusetts
Tucked away in the far northwestern corner of Massachusetts, Mount Greylock State Reservation deserves special acclaim. For one thing, the park encompasses nearly 20 square miles of territory in Berkshire County, ranking it among the largest parks in Southern New England. And for that matter, Mount Greylock itself is the highest mountaintop in Massachusetts at 3,489 feet. Visitors can take in views of five states from its summit or hike any of the 70 miles of trails that weave up and around the mountain slopes. Everything about this park exists on a much larger scale than what we’re generally accustomed to in New England’s relatively crowded southern states.
“Greylock Summit” Veterans War Memorial Tower atop Mount Greylock, Adams, Massachusetts
I could go on and on about Mount Greylock in general, but my focus in introducing my piece, “Faithful Even Unto Death”, is the Veterans War Memorial which stands atop the mountain summit. Built in 1933 to honor the soldiers of World War I, the beautiful 93-foot granite tower looks like some ancient, mythologized lighthouse that you might awe over in a history book. Indeed, just like a maritime lighthouse, a large globe at the monument’s peak glows throughout the night and is said to be visible from the surrounding hills up to 70 miles away. And for the curious minds out there, the name of my image is excerpted from an inscription on one of the memorial plaques which says of the fallen soldiers that “they were faithful even unto death”.
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In my piece, “Becalming Birge Pond”, colors streak across a sunset sky over Central Connecticut as the first day of summer comes to a close on the mirror-like waters of Birge Pond.
Centuries-old ponds and waterfalls that once powered streamside mills are quite prevalent in my work, especially because most have long-since been retired from serving industrial purposes and blossomed into places of natural beauty. Birge Pond may have had similar origins and enjoys a similar golden era in its “retirement”, but its final stint of commercial use in the early 1900s was of a sort that has largely been forgotten in modern times. Consider that, prior to electric refrigerators becoming a widespread appliance, cooling food or drink during the warmer months of the year meant storing it in an insulated icebox beside a brick of ice. But if there weren’t refrigerators in homes, and if ice couldn’t be produced using industrial freezers, then how in the world did folks find ice for their iceboxes in the middle of the summer?
Birge Pond was one of many long-standing “ice ponds” across Connecticut which, once naturally frozen in the wintertime, would be harvested of its ice. The large, quarried ice blocks would then be tucked away in spacious barns to be stored and eventually sold throughout the coming year. Proper ventilation and generous packings of hay for insulation were actually so effective that some ice houses, such as the Southern New England Ice House that operated on Birge Pond, could reportedly keep ice for up to a couple years after harvest!
The industry of harvesting and selling ice was so essential and so ubiquitous in those earlier days that it probably seemed as if it’d be around forever. But as innovators worked through various ways to incorporate refrigerants into early designs of “electric iceboxes”, everything began to change. The Southern New England Ice House on Birge Pond was shuttered in 1933 and torn down shortly afterwards. Refrigerators became commonplace by the 1940s and ice harvesting, a widespread and commonplace industry just a few decades earlier, was relegated to the history books.
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“Náham” Wild turkey in meadow, Harwinton, Connecticut
It’s rare that I have an opportunity to photograph turkeys, as they aren’t fond of allowing me to approach close enough to use a 200mm lens (the longest I typically carry for landscapes). It’s even rarer that they’re still enough and my hands steady enough for a sharp, handheld exposure as was the case with my new piece, “Náham”. That there happened to be a beautiful, solitary sapling in this meadow roughly aligned with the turkey was the icing on the proverbial cake. Sometimes everything just falls into place.
If you’re curious, “náham” was the term for ‘turkey’ in the language of the Mohegan natives, whose ancestors were living in the territory of present-day Connecticut at least as early as the 1500s. There was something about this close encounter with a wild turkey in a quiet, misty field that felt uniquely timeless, as if the exact same perspective could just as easily have been available to tribesmen of times long past. Using the ancient Mohegan word for this equally ancient, native bird seemed a most fitting choice.
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There is perhaps no surer a sign that proper springtime weather has arrived than the emergence of daffodils throughout Connecticut. From town parks to yard gardens, by late April it seems that you can scarcely take a short drive anywhere in the state without seeing clusters of these showy jewels swaying about. But in two spots especially -Meriden’s Hubbard Park and Litchfield’s Laurel Ridge- the immense plantings of daffodils are truly a springtime spectacle.
Hubbard Park can undoubtedly lay claim to the most expansive fields of daffodils, for some 600,000 push through the soil each year. And remarkably, it all started with an initial planting of just 1,000 bulbs in 1949. Over the years, more were planted regularly and established bulbs continued to multiply. By 1979, with Hubbard Park already well-known for its April flower display, the city of Meriden established the annual Daffodil Festival which attracts crowds every year from well beyond the city.
But in 1941, a handful of years before Hubbard Park got its first daffodils, bulbs were already being planted along Laurel Ridge in the Litchfield Hills some 20 miles to the northwest. And while the planting on Laurel Ridge probably can’t boast quite the same volume of daffodils as Hubbard Park (I can’t find an estimate anywhere), I can say from experience that there are more than enough to impress and some might find the quiet, bucolic setting of Laurel Ridge to be a welcome bonus.
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“An April Greeting” Roaring Brook at Cotton Hollow Preserve, Glastonbury, Connecticut
“The birds have a right to complain of misplaced confidence, and so have we, since the blandness of spring the day before deluded us into regarding her intentions as honourable,” wrote Charles Whiting in 1903, lamenting a springtime snow in New England not so different from the one we endured a few days ago here in Connecticut. Indeed, one could scarcely discern this April vista of Roaring Brook from wintry visions of a January blizzard.
But even Whiting had to concede a certain admiration for the waning wiles of winter. “It was really very beautiful snow, and whether dissipating in the sunshine or shining in the moonlight, it was several degrees whiter than the average. Less meteoric dust in it. Spring snow always looks so very young, and it is a blessing to the new grass and young grain,— one of those blessings that brighten as they take their flight.”
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