railroad Archives – J. G. Coleman Photography

“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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