Tag: New England

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All Things Connecticut New Print Releases The American Northeast

Simbury’s Flower Bridge

Iron Bouquet (Old Drake Hill Flower Bridge, Simsbury, Connecticut, USA)
“Iron Bouquet”
Old Drake Hill Flower Bridge, Simsbury, Connecticut
© 2015 J. G. Coleman

Century-old iron girders frame the marvelously symmetrical trusses of the Old Drake Hill Bridge. The imposing metal structure stands in stark contrast to the airy clouds above and enjoys a palette of colorful blooms growing from planters and hanging flower pots.

Wooden covered bridges dominated the Connecticut landscape throughout most of the 1800s. But as the turn of the century grew closer, the reign of the wooden bridge was literally crumbling away as floods, fires and the rigors of the elements laid waste to Connecticut’s aging crossings. State-of-the-art iron bridges arose wherever old covered bridges required replacement, oftentimes sitting upon the very same abutments.

Such was the case with the iron Drake Hill Bridge in Simsbury, which was built over the Farmington River in 1892 as a direct replacement for an earlier covered bridge. Owing to its durable metal components, the Drake Hill Bridge remarkably carried traffic for 100 years, its term of service beginning with horse-drawn carriages and spanning all the way to Chevy pickups and Honda Civics. By 1992, it was finally decommissioned after a new concrete bridge was built nearby. In its retirement, the beloved Drake Hill Bridge now takes it easy, carrying only pedestrians and being adorned every year with a gorgeous array of flowers.

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All Things Connecticut New Print Releases The American Northeast

Dawn on the Farmlands of Durham

Yankee Farmlands
Yankee Farmlands № 37 (Old barns at dawn, Durham, Connecticut)
“Yankee Farmlands № 37”
Old barns at dawn, Durham, Connecticut
© 2015 J. G. Coleman

Faint clouds cling to hills and pastures of the Coginchaug River Valley in Central Connecticut. Warm, morning sunlight struggles to permeate the heavy air over a complex of old barns and sheds clad with weathered planks and crowned by sheet metal and shingles. Nestled into the buildings is a cozy barnyard, bound by split-rails and cloaked in shadow beneath a shade tree.

Throughout most of Southern New England’s agricultural past, barn roofs were dressed with wooden shingles. Self-reliant farmers of that era could hand-split these shingles, or “shakes”, off logs harvested from their woodlot, thus eliminating the need to buy anything besides the necessary fasteners. With only a few exceptions, wooden shingles were the perfect solution in those early days, providing a durable, homemade roof which could potentially last two or three decades.

Perhaps the only glaring difficulty presented by wooden shingles was the simple fact that they were highly flammable. Fire could quickly lay waste to timber-framed barns and roofs clad in wood only hastened the destruction. For that matter, farm houses were oftentimes roofed with the same wooden shingles as their companion barns, so if either structure caught fire, all it may have taken was a few stray embers to set the other building ablaze.

Alternatives to the wooden shingle such as metal barn roofing, often in the form of corrugate sheets, didn’t arise until the late 1800s and grew in popularity after the turn of the century. Northern New Englanders, possibly owing to their harsher winters, adopted metal roofing a bit more readily more than their neighbors in Southern New England who instead tended to favor slightly less resilient asphalt shingles.

In “Yankee Farmlands № 37” (above), we see a range of roofing materials that have likely been applied as needed throughout the decades. The largest barn is capped with old, wavy tin sheeting, while a small shed on the perimeter of the barnyard sports a more modern steel roof with patterned ribs. Asphalt shingles have also managed their way into the mix, covering the addition beside the large barn and even capping the old silo.

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All Things Connecticut New Print Releases The American Northeast

Talcott Cloudscape

Talcott Cloudscape (Hublein Tower & Talcott Mountain, Simsbury, Connecticut)
“Talcott Cloudscape”
Hublein Tower & Talcott Mountain, Simsbury, Connecticut
© 2015 J. G. Coleman

Towering cumulus clouds, their exquisite contours etched into a deep blue sky, soar over the crest of Talcott Mountain in Northern Connecticut. Broad shadows cast upon the ridge top engulf the distant, century-old Hublein Tower, a monolithic structure rising high above the forest canopy.

At roughly 700 feet tall, Talcott Mountain (seen in my newly-released piece above, “Talcott Cloudscape”) climbs prominently from the forests and farmlands of the Farmington River Valley. But perhaps it is Hublein Tower, at a height of 165 feet, which lends a better sense of scale to the vast, airy spectacle of clouds overhead.

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All Things Connecticut New Print Releases The American Northeast

Summertime Orchards of New Hartford

Yankee Farmlands № 36 (Pear Tree beside an old fieldstone wall in an orchard, New Hartford, Connecticut)
“Yankee Farmlands № 36”
Orchard beside an old fieldstone wall, New Hartford, Connecticut
© 2015 J. G. Coleman

A thriving pear tree, its branches bowing with the weight of ripe fruit, arches over a fieldstone wall at the edge of an orchard in Northern Connecticut. Distant apple trees promise an equally generous harvest as gentle clouds soar overhead.

An 1838 book, The New American Orchardist, commented that “next to the apple, the fruit tree most generally cultivated in New England is the pear.” The author went on to explain that, despite looking very similar, pear trees are actually quite different from apple trees. “The pear tree”, we are reminded,” also differs essentially from the apple in its superior longevity.”

Indeed, the oldest cultivated fruit tree still alive in the United States is the famed Endicott Pear Tree in Essex County, Massachusetts. So named because it was raised by John Endicott, the first governor of Massachusetts, the tree is believed to have been planted roughly a decade after the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock. To this day, at an age of about 385, it still produces fruit.

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All Things Connecticut New Print Releases The American Northeast

A Silent Barn in New Milford

Yankee Farmlands № 35 (Hay Barn, New Milford, Connecticut)
“Yankee Farmlands № 35”
Hay barn and bale elevator at dawn, New Milford, Connecticut
© 2015 J. G. Coleman

Dawn breaks over farmland in Western Connecticut on a humid summer morning. A bale elevator is perched silently at the open door of a barn overlooking woodlands in the valley below which glow with a luminous mist as sharply-angled sunlight pierces the canopy.

Photographing agricultural landscapes can occasionally be tricky, for unlike the wildlands that I shoot, farms are essentially private, man-made landscapes where the presence of a photographer wandering around in the wee hours of the morning is not always welcome. But from time to time I’ve had the pleasure of meeting and speaking with farmers that seem to understand intimately what draws photographers such as myself to their fields, rolling pastures and rustic barns.

Much like landscape photography, farming in New England generally isn’t easy or particularly lucrative work: farmers do it because they love it. They appreciate being on the land and being attuned with seasonal rhythms. A Connecticut tobacco farmer once explained that farming “isn’t a job, it’s a life.” That brand of passion, commitment and sincerity could just as easily explain the fervor with which the most dedicated landscape photographers approach their art.

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All Things Connecticut New Print Releases The American Northeast

Schaghticoke Rising

Schaghticoke Rising (Housatonic River, Kent, Connecticut)
“Schaghticoke Rising”
Housatonic RiverKent, Connecticut
© 2015 J. G. Coleman

With the recent weather here in Southern New England mercifully cooling, it seems timely to remind everyone to enjoy what’s left of the summer. If there’s a lingering shred of superstition in your bones, you’ll take heed that the Farmer’s Alamanac calls for “copious amounts of snow” during the coming winter with the “coldest outbreak of the season” predicted for late January.

I produced the piece seen here along the wintry banks of the Housatonic during the final week of January earlier this year. The riverscape that morning lent a certain presence to nature’s penchant for paradox; awakening with splendor, yet still so very dormant… at once, both enchanting and foreboding. “Schaghticoke Rising” (above) was my effort at capturing that bewildering contradiction as it unfolded in the minutes before dawn.

For the curious minds out there, the title of this piece hearkens back to the earliest days of Kent when the remnants of declining native tribes across Connecticut took refuge from encroaching Europeans in the rough, wooded hills of the township. Calling themselves the Schaghticoke (usually pronounced Scat-uh-cook), this amalgam of native peoples became one of the largest indigenous nations in Southern New England. They were also granted one of the earliest reservations ever created in the New World, obtaining some 2,500 acres from the Connecticut Colony in 1736.

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All Things Connecticut New Print Releases The American Northeast

Giant Sunflowers of Griswold

Yankee Farmlands № 34 (Field of giant sunflowers in Connecticut’s “Quiet Corner”, Griswold, Connecticut)
“Yankee Farmlands № 34”
Field of giant sunflowers in Connecticut’s “Quiet Corner”, Griswold, Connecticut
© 2015 J. G. Coleman

Giant sunflowers crowd a verdant field in Connecticut’s Eastern Uplands as sprawling clouds drift across the summertime sky. The vista featured in “Yankee Farmlands No. 34” (above) is the latest installment in my project which celebrates the agricultural heritage of Southern New England through Connecticut’s scenic farmlands.

Among North America’s ancient food crops, the sunflower was widely cultivated by Native Americans for at least 4,000 years before Spanish explorers first laid eyes on the plant in the 1500s. Specimens were brought back home to Spain and, from there, spread throughout Europe.

Russia can be credited with breeding the gargantuan sunflowers with which we are familiar today. But while sunflowers had grown popular in Europe, they had fallen out of vogue as crops in North America. So even though sunflowers began their journey as food crops thousands of years ago in the Americas, the modern practice of farming them in the United States didn’t really take off until Russia shipped their huge sunflowers overseas in the late 1800s.

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All Things Connecticut New Print Releases The American Northeast

Fieldstone Walls of New England

Yankee Farmlands № 31 (Fieldstone wall in Bolton, Connecticut, USA)
“Yankee Farmlands № 31”
Bolton, Connecticut
© 2015 J. G. Coleman

“Yankee Farmlands № 31” is the latest installment in an on-going project of mine in which I celebrate the agricultural heritage of New England through the scenic farmlands of Connecticut. This time around, we find ourselves in the small town of Bolton, peering at a barn and forest-bound meadow over the lichen-encrusted rocks of an iconic fieldstone wall.

Most of New England’s fieldstone walls were built 150 to 200 years ago during an era in which an ever-growing population was feverishly clearing new farmland. Exhausting labor went into constructing these walls as untold tons of stone were plucked from the upper layers of soil, hauled off to the outskirts of the pasture or field and loosely stacked by hand.

These relict stone walls are celebrated for their rustic aesthetic these days, but we might be surprised to discover that they were considered rather mundane at the time of their construction. For the Yankee farmers that built them, fieldstone walls merely represented a practical way to dispose of agricultural refuse. It wasn’t until the 20th-century, when much of New England’s age-old agrarian ways had faded, that rustic stone walls became romantic relics of a simpler, unhurried era in the region’s history.

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New Print Releases The American Northeast

Goreham’s Crossing at Pittsford

Goreham’s Crossing at Pittsford (Goreham Bridge over Otter Creek, Pittsford & Proctor, Vermont)
“Goreham’s Crossing at Pittsford”
Goreham Bridge over Otter Creek, Pittsford & Proctor, Vermont
© 2015 J. G. Coleman

As I stood upon a muddy riverbank during a warm spring morning in Vermont’s Rutland County, I watched reflections of the weathered Goreham Bridge ripple upon Otter Creek beneath a hazy sky streaked with broad, indistinct swaths of luminous blues. My piece, “Goreham’s Crossing at Pittsford”, emerged from that moment and brings together several elements which elaborate upon the sense of place wrapped up in this rustic riverscape in the Green Mountain State.

Built in 1842 and carrying traffic to this day, Goreham Bridge is one of four 19th-century covered bridges remaining in the rural town of Pittsford. That’s no small feat when you consider that the entire state of Connecticut has only three! But the town of Montgomery, about 100 miles north near the Canadian border, can justifiably be called Vermont’s “covered bridge capital”. Remarkably, seven covered bridges are scattered across the township’s 56 square miles.

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