A Landscape Made By Hand
In the northwestern corner of Connecticut, there is a pretty town called Colebrook. The landscape is serene and pastoral. The main villages, Colebrook Center and North Colebrook, have both become National Historic Districts.
About fifty years ago a small boy spent many summer days exploring the woods of North Colebrook, near his uncle’s farm. One afternoon he happened on a many-windowed old building, deep in the woods. (At least that was how it struck his nine-year-old mind. Actually the building stood less than fifty feet from an old town road.) It didn’t feel like an abandoned house. Looking back, he would remember the absence of lilacs in the dooryard and the fact that no one side seemed to be clearly the front.
But that day he spent little time trying to figure out what the structure must have been. He was too interested in the gleam of the afternoon sun on the old, small-paned windows. Many panes, of course, were broken. But even more were not. It was as if they had been saved specially for him. Without making anything that could be called a conscious decision, he looked among the roots of the birches and pines for a stone of suitable size. New England soil being what it is, he quickly found one. He threw it. With a fine splintering crash, a pane broke.
This was too keen a pleasure not to repeat, and he went to look for another rock. He threw again, and another pane went tinkling in. Soon he shifted to a better source of missiles: a pile of rosy old bricks, mostly fragmented, that he found on the north side of the building. Pieces of brick throw well. Before he started back to his uncle’s house, he had broken every remaining pane on the first floor and most on the second. When he got home to supper, he said nothing about the adventure to his aunt and uncle. Experience had taught him that anything that much fun was likely to be disapproved of by adults.
Years later, when he was a relatively sophisticated college student, he dated a girl in Colebrook Center whose mother was trying to assemble enough panes of wavy old glass to reglaze all the windows of a colonial house she was restoring. Listening to the mother, he felt almost awed by how much history he had been able to smash in a single afternoon. By then he also knew what history it was. He knew that the building he had found was the old cheese factory in North Colebrook—one of the thousands of industrial ruins that were and still are scattered across New England. The mother’s passion affected him. If given a chance, he would retroactively have saved those windows.
But another dozen years had to pass before he began to think in terms of beauty as well as history. Now a teacher, husband, and father, he had come to own an old house himself: an 1820 Federal brick farmhouse in eastern Vermont. He had bought it cheap because the roof had been about to fall in.
The front and both ends of the house had been modernized sometime around 1900. Among other things, the original windows had been replaced with Victorian two-over-twos—easy to clean and quite homely. But whoever did the job had economized on the back. There the original small-paned windows remained: nine-over-sixes, wavy glass with an occasional tiny air bubble. Each pane was different. Those windows took a lot of scraping and puttying, and before he had finished, the grown man had fallen in love with old window glass. It now struck him that he might have destroyed more beauty by throwing bricks at the cheese factory than by, say, chopping down the apple trees in his uncle’s orchard. Apple trees grow again.
IN NO WAY DO I BLAME MYSELF FOR TAK ing more than twenty years to come to see beauty in the North Colebrook cheese factory. Windows apart, it can never have been a specially handsome building. Anyway, it was a factory , set down in a pastoral landscape, and I was raised in the tradition of the romantic poets. In this tradition, nature is a healing force and industry is a disease, a kind of blight. Industry attacks a green valley the way mycelium attacks a green leaf. It can leave the valley black.
The opposition to industry can be put in religious terms as well as medical, and it often was. The most famous single reference to industry in the poetry of the romantics was made by William Blake. And what did he say? He said that “dark Satanic mills” were taking over England’s green and pleasant land. God is a shepherd, as we know from the Twenty-third Psalm. The devil turns out to be an engineer.
The thought is one that precedes the romantics. Milton had it, for example. In his story God designed that green and pleasant place, the Garden of Eden. Satan meanwhile set up smelting plants in hell and went into the business of producing iron, copper, and tin. He also built the first firearms plant. Samuel Colt’s factory in Hartford, Connecticut, came much later.
The thought is still with us now. You will find it, for example, in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings , where Saruman’s fortress-factory of Isengard is a type of hell, and Saruman himself a satanic figure, master of many furnaces. Isengard (the name seems to mean “Iron Shield”) is eventually conquered and redeemed by an assault of the trees, by ents and huorns, much as the North Colebrook cheese factory was surrounded and finally conquered by birches and pines.
Milton, Blake, and Tolkien were not wholly wrong either. Factories and mines do frequently blight landscapes. There is a blighted landscape not three miles from where I live—a vast, ruined slope covered with tailings from the Strafford copper mine. The mine closed in 1954; the slope stays poisoned. It will be so for many decades.
But not all mills are satanic, and I think especially few of them may be in New England, where from the very beginning there has been a symbiosis between the pastoral and the mechanical. That is, we have always had what I think is called a mixed economy. The early farmers produced and marketed handmade nails in their spare time: They were metalworkers as well as shepherds of flocks. The early millowners were apt to keep (and sometimes personally milk) a family cow, just as an early philosopher like Emerson raised (and sometimes personally fed) an annual pig.
The result is that we have always had what could be called a mixed landscape. Fields and forests and factories have coexisted—not always happily but often. And it is worth remembering that though the forests were here before the first Indian, let alone the first white person, set foot in what is now New England, and hence can be called natural, the fields and the factories are both man-made. One is undoubtedly more artificial than the other, but both are, in the literal sense of the word, manufactured, since the facture part means “to make” and the manu part means “hand.” Handmade fields and handmade factories in early New England: both are apt to have stone walls.
The mixed landscape of my own town in Vermont makes a good example. Thetford has historically been farming country—better farmland than Colebrook, because of fewer rocks. Even now, when the almost-insane policies of the United States Department of Agriculture, reinforced by the universal determination of teen-agers to wash down their junk food with junk beverages, are rapidly destroying dairy farms, even now Thetford farmers ship much milk. That means many cows in town. And that in turn means many beautiful pastures, because cows are wonderful keepers of fields. They can produce greensward on which the grass is so neatly cropped that the suburban lawn was developed in conscious imitation. They can clip around rocks and up to walls far more deftly than any human with a string trimmer. They will keep all trees (except evergreens) pruned up to a uniform height—namely, the five feet that is a cow’s convenient reach when she has her head raised and her tongue out at comfortable leaf-flicking distance. As I write, the twenty-six acres of pasture on my own farm are in just such condition, kept so by the seventeen Jerseys and Herefords and young Holsteins that spent the summer here.
But the seal of the town of Thetford, which is rather elaborate, shows a tree-bordered lake, a good-sized factory beside a river, and a dairy farm with twin silos poking up above the barn. Underneath are three legends: “Scenic Beauty—Industry—Agriculture.”
Go a hundred feet east from the easternmost edge of my farm, and you will come to that river. You will not see any factories. The one on the seal exists, and still operates, but it’s four miles upstream, on the far edge of town. What you will see is the covered bridge that takes our road, once called Mill Street, into the village of Thetford Center. Just below that you will see a partly ruined dam, and below that the Ompompanoosuc River cascading down a long series of rapids. The dam is concrete and fairly modern. A local farmer built it in 1916 and brought electricity to the village.
Keep looking. There are many birch trees and young elms (this is a beautiful place), and in the summer not all the old foundations are easy to spot. But they’re there. Look over at the far bank of the little river, and you will gradually notice one massive stone foundation after another. A hundred and thirty years ago there were five mills in a row along the river here, and there were three dams, one below the other, to supply them with waterpower. Thetford Center was a mill village, but it was neither dark nor satanic.
Industry came to the village around 1806, when a couple of local men set up a carding and cloth-dressing mill. Over the next half-century more different kinds of factories lined up their waterwheels next to it than you might think possible. A carriage factory sprang up, and a factory that made window sashes and shutters. (You can still see shutters of its distinctive design all over town.) Also a potato-starch factory, a scythe and ax factory (with a one-person work force), a musical instrument factory, an axletree maker, a cabinet shop. A piece of furniture made there is now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
Most of these “factories” were tiny—if they had been satanic, they would have been run by imps, not fullgrown devils—and most of them lasted for only ten or fifteen years. Then the building and wheel and water rights would pass to someone else.
But wars, which invariably produce profiteers, are a great stimulus to industiy. During the Civil War, and for a decade or two after it, little Thetford Center came to have several large manufacturing plants. Well, middlesized, anyway. One, called the Noosuc Mill, was half a mile downriver from the covered bridge. It employed about twenty-five people, and it made a thick, tough, yellowish paper known as strawboard and also the binder’s board used for hardcover books. A few years ago, when my wife had our kitchen remodeled, there turned out to be a double layer of that heavy yellow paper under the kitchen floor as insulation. Not too surprising, 1 suppose, because our house was once owned by Horace Brown, a native of Thetford Center who fought in the Civil War as an Army captain. His first move when he came home was to buy the Noosuc Mill, and he ran it until he started a shoe factory, still farther downstream. One would expect him to insulate his own house with his own strawboard. What you might not expect is that this small-time industrial magnate would have a large barn built onto the end of his house, complete with inside silo for storing winter cattle feed. But he did.
Finally, nearly a mile below the bridge, there was the woolen mill, which ran from late in the Civil War until about 1880 and which in its best days had about fifty employees. It must have been a stunning sight to see all those mills running at once, all those waterwheels turning, and the great leather belts taking the power from the wheel shafts to the machinery. The falls may have been more beautiful then than they are now, when there are only the half-broken dam and the halfhidden foundations of some of the mills to frame the view.
Even the great villainous industry of this part of Vermont has left beauty behind it. Some six or seven miles from Captain Brown’s house is another and much older copper mine than the one in Strafford. This one had its beginning back in 1820, when people living along Copperfield Brook in the town of Vershire organized what was called the Farmers’ Company. The farmers dug a little ore by hand. They also “erected a rude smelting furnace,” as a man named Hamilton Child put it in 1888. They even made a little money.
But they had neither the capital nor the technology to do large-scale mining. Serious operations didn’t begin until six New York City investors bought the mineral rights in 1853 and set up business as the Vermont Copper Mining Company. They put in some serious furnaces, and by the end of the Civil War around a hundred and fifty people were working at the mine and the adjacent smelter. Then, just about the time Captain Brown came home from the Civil War to take over the strawboard plant, a still richer investor from New Jersey named Smith Ely took over what soon became known as the Ely Mine. (And the little village of Copperfield became the growing new village of Ely.) Where there had been three farmhouses in 1850, there were now a hundred families living, plus two churches and a dance hall.
Smith Ely thought big. The miners, all four hundred of them, worked by candlelight—one candle per miner. But the smelting plant went modern. By the late 187Os he had a refinery seven hundred feet long and sixty-two feet wide. He had twenty-four furnaces and seventy desulfurizing ovens. He was making copper 95 percent pure, where the early farmers thought they had done well to get the proportion of copper up to 12 or 14 percent before they shipped their product off to more sophisticated refineries on the coast.
Smith Ely had also produced a miniature version of contemporary acid rain. Twenty-four furnaces make a lot of smoke. Smoke of this kind contains a lot of sulfur dioxide. His first achievement was to produce a defoliation of the hillsides along Copperfield Brook as thorough and as devastating as that which later Americans produced in Vietnam. Next to go was farming up and down the valley, as the grass died. About then a new kind of Farmers’ Company formed, and since there was no Environmental Protection Agency to complain to, the farmers complained directly to the mine officials. They may even have waved pitchforks in a menacing fashion. And the officers of the Vermont Copper Mining Company responded exactly as the EPA would have made them do a century later. They figured out a way to spread the pollution around, so that people in the valley would get a lot less and everyone for miles around would get a little bit more.
The technology didn’t exist then to put up the kind of EPA-mandated giant smokestack that now distributes industrial pollution so freely across the United States and even around the world; but Vermont is hilly country, and an early version of pollution sharing was possible. The Vermont Copper Mining Company dug a six-foot-deep trench all the way up the side of a small mountain behind the smelting works. Today you’d probably put a noncorroding pipeline up such a trench. They didn’t have the technology for that either. Instead, with men and oxen they brought stones and they made the trench into a walled tunnel. It rises five hundred feet, from where the smelter used to be to the top of the hill, and it is nearly half a mile long. All that way they capped it with huge, flat rocks—rocks as big as double beds, some of them, and four to six inches thick. These were fitted so tightly as to be smokeproof. The smoke was forced up to the summit, where it caught the wind and rode out across Vermont, to begin its descent into other valleys.
Partly because there was never a railroad up to Copperfield, so that the coal had to come in nine miles on wagons and the copper had to leave the same way, the Ely Mine failed in the 188Os. Easier mines to work were being discovered, first in Michigan and then still farther west. But there is no ghost town, as there might be in Colorado. Dry climates preserve abandoned industrial sites indefinitely; tropical jungles swallow them up almost at once. Vermont is somewhere in between.
Today there are no traces of the seven-hundred-foot smelting plant (or the dance hall, either) except on a few acres of level ground so poisoned that trees still can’t grow. There you can sometimes pick up a fragment of an imported Scottish firebrick, packed into the silty yellow rubble. Just above that spot, however, and across the brook, the once-desolate hillsides are handsome with oak and birch. Isengard is fallen.
But not entirely, not yet. The stone tunnel up the hillside is still there, now lost in trees. It is one of the most beautiful ruins I know. Some of the capstones have fallen in, and a few at the lower end are missing, presumably hauled away by people who know a beautiful slab when they see one. Where the tunnel is thus uncovered, sometimes a young tree is growing right inside it. At these roofless spots you can see the inner stonework on the two sides of the tunnel. It is better drystone wall than I can build, though I have been repairing old walls and building new ones for twenty years.
When I first saw that solemn ruin in the woods, I had no idea what its function had been. None of the select few people I have taken to see it have guessed either. They have imagined miners running down it in the winter, with wheelbarrow loads of ore. They have imagined water rushing down a sluice, though once we reach the top of the little mountain, and there is no brook up there where the tunnel ends, or so much as a wet spot, they’ve had to give that theory up. In the end they’ve had to be told, as I was. But not one has failed to be impressed, as one might be by a pyramid. The final legacy of Copperfield Village has been an addition to the natural beauty of the region, a human accent mark on the hill.
All over New England, industry comes and goes. Right now more is coming than going, at least in the part where I live. At this very minute there is a proposal to rebuild the dam below the covered bridge in Thetford Center and resume the generation of electricity. There is also resistance to the proposal, both because a lot of trees would be cut down and a homely little powerhouse built, and because a historic site would be disturbed. (The irony, of course, is that it’s historic for waterwheels and other forms of power generation.)
I see no assurance that present or future waves of factory building will leave such handsome remains behind as former ones have. Many modern factories strike me as stunningly ugly. If I imagine a boy giant throwing stones at them until they are smashed, I see a ruin of concrete and plastic that would simply be a blight on our green and pleasant land. But it is notoriously hard to judge one’s own time. I have seen pictures of Copperfield Village in its heyday, and it was an ugly sight, too. If I had lived then, I think I would have said that that corner of Vershire was ruined, probably forever. I think I would not have imagined people coming a century later to stare in awe at the smelter chimney.
It may be that unless we manage to kill off trees altogether (in which case we’ll presumably kill ourselves off too), the alternating cycles of farm and factory will keep making the New England landscape richer and richer. At least it would be nice to think so.
