OLD MILLS THAT ARE NO MORE

Well, no longer running, anyway.

Connecticut  is filled with them. Just drive down any country road in winter and you can see them; small walls that used to hold back water to form a millpond and thin, deep races that took water from the long-gone pond upstream to a vanished grist or lumber mill remembered only as a couple of walls or a depression in the bank.

Connectikittens and Yankees have always been frugal, hard-working and  industrious. There were mills of different sorts within five years of the Pilgrims' landing at Plymouth, and many were tiny one-man (or single family) operations. All you needed was a stream with a more or less constant flow, some vertical fall, a lot of rocks for walls, and a market.

New England has a lot of all the above.

I'll feature a few here and some more as I can get decent pictures. I'm doing this in March, which is a winter month up here, so I don't always get as much sun as I'd like for my pics to jump.

So it was this day.

I used to take a long, winding bunch of backroads to work, which was forty two miles north of here in Preston, and each day, I'd pass a few of these millsites and say, "I need to stop and get some pics of those for the blog!"

It took for me to get laid off to do it.

 

The Natchaug River is one of the premier trout streams in the state of Connecticut; drive by on opening day and you'll see hundreds of cars parked illegally for a mile in either direction. After opening day, there are only a few. Fair weather fishermen the first day. I've seen this fast-moving river in full flood in spring, and trust me, it sports killer Class 6 rapids. Don't try it. Too many rocks to make it an easy kayak in low water, it is quite the challenge in midwater times. This is Diana's Pool, a popular swimming hole in summer. I took this pic from the 198 bridge.

 

Just downstream of the bridge, the remnants of a mill can be seen in the center of the picture, as well as the old Bedlam Road bridge abutment just downstream from that. I have no idea what the mill was used for or its configuration. As close as this wall is to the water, I can only guess it was hell to run in high water. The road coming into the larger road is Diana's Pool Road, and was likely the original road, as it heads directly for the old stone abutment.

 

Hard to get a good picture from this side of the river, and ice underfoot made it impossible to get closer. Unless I wanted to go swimming. It was twenty six degrees this day.

 

Highway 198 bridge, built in 1926 and recently restored. Built right into the massive schist cliff, it is. Diana's Pool Road and my black van in the parking area beyond.

 

I don't know that this is ever enforced, except possibly in times of high water. But that's usually in spring, when the water temps are just above freezing as is the air. In July and August there is a train of local kids walking to and from this spot, all in differing degrees of wetness.

 

Danger! Danger Will Robinson!

 

Just down the road are the remnants of the Chafeeville Silk Mill, which operated in the 1830s until the silk industry in Connecticut died. Always entrepreneurs, some Connecticut Yankee decided to import silkworms and to grow mulberry trees for them to feed upon. Local women were hired to unspin the cocoons and the mill here (and many others) respun the silk into fabric. It worked for a while until the overseas trade with China got going, and we couldn't compete. Or so they say. I think the women got tired of unravelling tens of thousands of inch-long cocoons. The dam on Fenton Brook can be seen through the trees, and one of the race walls can be spotted a little closer. An interesting fact: gypsy moths were also brought in to expand the silk industry, Smart idea, hunh? Kind of like Asian Carp, the snakehead, Dutch Elm Disease, Burmese pythons, the Emerald Ash Borer and the Chestnut Blight. All brought here by humans with too much money and too little brains.

 

A better pic of the race, which concentrated the water from the millpond above the dam and could be controlled for rate of flow by restricting or cutting off the amount of water, usually with moveable doors that slid up and down in wood frames.

 

An old road that served the mill area. Now a trail for hikers. We have a lot of these in Connecticut. Old railroad beds and wagon roads crisscross the state.

 

A little better view of the dam, showing where Fenton Brook goes between the two sections. Likely had a bridge over it in olden days. The stonework is beautiful. I couldn't get much closer, as the snow had turned to ice and the footing was treacherous this day.

 

The Gurleyville Grist Mill, also on Fenton Brook, restored as a museum open on weekends in warmer months. Unusual rockwork, it resembles what we in Arkansas and Missouri call 'giraffe rock,' where the stone is put on edge rather than stacked horizontally. It utilizes a lot less stone, but that stone must be flat and uniform, and the structure is not as solid as horizontally-laid rock. My immediate question upon seeing this mill was "Where the hell is the race? Or the remnants of the wheel?" It unlikely had a turbine (those were used in much larger industrial mills), and though it is obviously not used anymore, there should be vestiges of the mechanicals. Hell, there's a WINDOW where there should be a wheel!

 

On the street side, it looks like the left wall is bulging. Giraffe rock will do that. Unusual species, too. It looks like sandstone, which is fairly rare in this state. Some of the gray corner stones look to be fine-grained granite or granodiorite.

 

It IS bulging.

 

Someone drilled through the rock and put anchor rods through to a more stable element inside, tying it  in place with large nuts. Two windows so close together (and the two above) were prolly the culprit, weakening the already-prone-to-move giraffe rock.

I looked in the windows to see the workings, but couldn't see any. Some elevated wood walkways were all I could see in the darkness. I'll revisit it in warmer months and update you then.

 

No race! The concrete wall seems to be for retaining the soil.

The bridge below the mill is made to look as if it is stone, and someone went to some effort to do so. The stone is cast concrete in panels about eight feet long. You can see the seams if you look closely. Nice effort if you don't have the cash for a real stone bridge, which costs mucho dinero. Fenton Brook, which is really more of a river, flows at the left. And strangely enough, the millpond is on the opposite side of the river from the mill. It's possible that there was an elevated race that crossed the river in a wooden flume.