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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“Winchester Lately” Hammonasset Beach State Park, Madison, Connecticut
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: it’s hard to beat shooting the Connecticut coast during wintertime. Many of the coastal elements that I’m interested in working with as a landscape photographer are unchanged whether it’s 35° F or 85° F, whether I’m shooting in short sleeves or bundled beneath three layers. There’s one big difference, though: when those cold winds are blowing I usually have the place to myself… an opportunity which is rare at most of Connecticut’s popular state park seashores during warmer weather!
I produced this piece, “Winchester Lately”, just this past weekend during a cold January morning. But let’s face it: if I told you this had been taken in August, you’d have no reason believe otherwise, right?
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“Savin Dawning” Bradley Point Park, West Haven, Connecticut
Beach grasses are deathly still with snow at their stems and frigid winter air creeping forth from Long Island Sound. But the incendiary spectacle upon the horizon, where the sun is just beginning to shine forth through the clouds, offers at least the prospect of some warmth come late morning.
Connecticut’s municipal beaches are usually not exceptionally well-known in the state outside of their host town or county, but owing to hundreds of years of recorded history along the coast, almost all of them were the backdrop for at least a couple interesting stories.
“Southwest Ledge from Afar” Southwest Ledge Lighthouse as seen from the shores of Bradley Point Park, New Haven, Connecticut
Bradley Point, for example, was for a short time the home of famous Beat poet and novelist Jack Kerouac. His father had moved the family from Massachusetts to West Haven, Connecticut after securing work. Though their first dwelling in the city proved deplorably unfit, they finally settled on renting a cottage on the West Haven shoreline at Bradley Point. Biographer Paul Maher says of Kerouac’s time there that “he swam in the Sound, labored over his writings, and prepared for his sophomore year of college while his mother worked hard to make her new house a home.”
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Alcatraz Island rises from the fog-laden waters of San Francisco Bay, its sundry array of towers and buildings illumined against the hazy silhouette of distant, coastal hills.
Hollywood films over the years have ensured that visions of a bleak and notorious federal prison are conjured in our imagination whenever we think of Alcatraz. But despite the vast amount of space that impression occupies in our memory, it actually comprises a fairly narrow slice of the island’s long and varied history. After all, Alcatraz Island was used as a federal penitentiary for less than three decades.
Relatively few recall that Alcatraz Island was the site of the first lighthouse on the West Coast or that as many as a hundred cannons were mounted on the island during the Civil War. Perhaps a more peculiar story though surrounds the origin of the island’s name. “Alcatraz” comes down from an old Spanish term for pelicans and was assigned to the island when early Spanish explorers found massive flocks of the seabirds roosting upon its cliffs in the late 1700s.
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As a rainstorm brews in the clouds above, the Pherrins River lazily snakes through the wilds of Northeastern Vermont, concealing a thriving population of the much sought-after native brook trout.
I produced this piece during a June fishing trip in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom last year, not long after my friends and I pulled several beautiful “brookies” from pools and riffles along this river. With June approaching once again, I’m growing excited to see where this year’s Vermont odyssey brings me.
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Early May doesn’t generally present the most welcoming beach weather in Southern New England, but it’s far preferable to the biting, 15° F winds that I encountered at McCook Point before dawn during the first days of March this past winter.
Found along the Connecticut coast on the sandy shores of Niantic, McCook’s Point had been known instead as Champlain’s Point prior to the mid-1800s. It wasn’t until a theology professor out of East Hartford, Reverend John James McCook, began spending summers there in 1869 that the proverbial seed was planted for a change of names.
What probably cemented McCook’s name on the point was a legal battle with state government in the 1920s. A small, state-operated tuberculosis hospital had been established nearby and it quickly became clear that a larger facility was required. McCook and his family refused to sell their 16-acre property to accommodate the hospital expansion and even fought the state in court when an attempt was made to condemn the property. The McCook family prevailed and the state abandoned its efforts in 1930, just three years after old John McCook passed away.
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Windswept coastal grasslands crowd a weathered boardwalk which ushers us towards the beachfront along the Connecticut coast. Out over the ocean, morning clouds stage a stirring display.
While the unspoiled beauty of coastal areas like Milford Point may be the prime draw for many sightseers, the most essential purpose of these protected beaches lies in providing breeding habitat for migratory shorebirds.
By the mid-1900s, some 120 million acres of waterfowl habitat had been lost to development in the United States. The federal government highlighted that very figure in a 1941 report, noting that “for many years most species of migratory game birds have been in a precarious situation”. Perhaps ironically, bird hunters of the era brought some of the earliest attention to problem, reporting dramatic reductions in available game compared to earlier decades. Luckily, these observations and subsequent studies spurred many early efforts to create a system of refuges to accommodate migratory birds, lest they decline to extinction. The work continues today.
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Beneath pastel skies streaked with soft clouds, the waters of Long Island Sound gently rap at tidal flats and salt grasses of Old Greenwich. To the east, further stretches of the Connecticut coast loom on the horizon against the sublime glow of morning twilight.
Indigenous people of the Asamuck and Patomuck tribes gave this low-lying peninsula on the west end of Long Island Sound its earliest name: “Monakewego”. If the 17th-century settlers of the Connecticut Colony once knew what that term meant, any record has been lost over the centuries. Throughout the 1700s and early 1800s, the spit of land was part and parcel to a modest community at what is today known as Old Greenwich.
Throughout those early days, it would’ve been hard to imagine that the influence of New York City, some 20 miles to the west, would eventually swell to such immense proportions that the coastal town of Greenwich and the rest of Connecticut’s Fairfield County would become one of the most affluent places in the nation.
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In my newly released piece, “Driftwood Surge”, whitewater erupts from a length of stranded driftwood as waves crash upon sandy beaches along the eastern Connecticut coast. A bare tree, perched upon the bluffs at the horizon, stands as the only indication that colder weather has descended upon this otherwise lovely shoreline park.
In an issue published in 1911, Country Life Magazine reflected on the virtues of Long Island Sound with a contagious enthusiasm. “Its edges are indented with numerous cosy harbors at convenient intervals, and fringed in some parts with many pleasant islands,” the author noted. “One of its harbors can hardly find a parallel in the world for beauty and charm; one of its estuaries has been said many times to surpass, not in rugged grandeur but in grace and soft beauty, both the Rhine and the Hudson.”
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When it was announced in late 2014 that Connecticut would be creating a new state park, I was all ears. After all, Connecticut’s diverse state parks are a treasure trove of publicly-accessible scenery which figure very prominently in my body of work. What I couldn’t have imagined was that this latest addition to the park system was, seemingly against all odds, a seashore park of more than 30 acres!
Dubbed “Seaside State Park”, this rocky stretch of beach where Long Island Sound laps at the Waterford mainland stands as the first new state-owned park along the Connecticut coast in more than two generations! That’s a big deal, folks, and I’ve been eager to experience this new place first-hand. As it would happen, it took more than a year before I finally stepped foot in the sand at Seaside State Park, but my visit earlier this month assured me that this unique landscape is a fitting addition to a state park system that boasts a marvelous range of variety. While you absorb my new work from Seaside, I invite you along to explore the origins and folklore behind this storied place.
If the creation of a new coastal state park in Connecticut is novel and a bit unusual in this day in age, then perhaps its a fitting installment in the equally novel and unusual history of Seaside State Park. While the crashing waves and panoramic views of the Sound rank high on the draws of this park, one cannot help but notice the massive, abandoned sanatorium that stands sentinel on higher ground just a stone’s throw from the water (see “Dunes and Echoes” above). The derelict building is at once beautiful and foreboding, its vacant windows peering out over the water from a gothic edifice which bears an eerie resemblance to the prototypical haunted mansion.
Known as “The Seaside” when it was constructed in the early 1930s on a magnificent beachfront in Waterford, the sanatorium would serve as Connecticut’s much-needed facility for treating children afflicted by tuberculosis. A noble cause for certain, but one which the medical knowledge of that era was ill-quipped to serve.
The treatment being administered was known as heliotherapy and consisted of little more than ensuring that the disease-stricken children got several hours of exposure to sunlight and fresh air each day. Coastal environments, of course, were the ideal place for such a treatment regimen. But while heliotherapy may certainly have succeeded in improving the morale of the young patients, it did next to nothing in the way of curing the terrible disease or significantly improving outcomes.
Thankfully, by the late 1940s, an antibiotic was developed which finally gave the medical community an effective tool to combat and cure tuberculosis. As the use of this revolutionary new medicine spread, mortality rates dropped off dramatically. The old concept of heliotherapy was abandoned and The Seaside sanatorium ceased to be medically relevant. The last tuberculosis patients to walk through its doors left in 1958.
The building was quickly repurposed as a healthcare center for the elderly, a provisional use which would last only a handful of years. It was converted to the Seaside Regional Center for the Mentally Retarded in 1961 and would go on to house and treat patients with intellectual disabilities right up into the 90s.
Popular folklore suggests that this final appropriation of The Seaside was concluded in 1996 when it was quietly decided by state officials that decades of terrifying patient abuse and a peculiarly high mortality rate among its residents simply had to be stopped. Yet, after conducting my own cursory research, I’ve come to the conclusion that these claims are likely to be false or, at best, wild exaggerations. It is true that, in the early 1970s, some current and former staff members claimed that the facility superintendent, Fred Finn, was mismanaging funds and abusing patients. Eleven employees of the facility testified against him at an official hearing. But the matter was complicated by the fact that many facility employees vouched for Finn; even the parents of many patients supported him, insisting that he was doing an excellent job. The official investigation considered the evidence and ultimately cleared the superintendent of all allegations.
And while we can speculate as to whether or not Finn was really innocent, the fact remains that this seems to have been the only real scandal involving The Seaside during more than 35 years of otherwise satisfactory operation as a mental health facility. Its closure in 1996 had nothing to do with sinister activity, but was instead the result of layoffs and budget cuts as the governor shifted the focus of mental health care from regional institutions to community-based solutions. So where did all of these stories of terrorized patients and staggering death tolls come from? Well, I guess that every “haunted sanatorium” needs a scary story, even if that story needs to be mostly fabricated. The vast majority of deaths at the facility occurred during its earlier use with tuberculosis-afflicted children who were claimed by a terrible and largely incurable disease; far from being abusive, doctors of that era were doing everything they possibly could.
You may remember that I described The Seaside earlier as both beautiful and foreboding. It’s beauty, in particular, is a point of great concern among those who feel that the crumbling building ought to be preserved in one way or another as part of this new state park’s development. The architect was none other than Cass Gilbert, a fairly famous individual whose designs include the prestigious G. Fox Building in Hartford, Connecticut and even the US Supreme Court Building in Washington, D.C. While The Seaside may not have been among his more famous creations, it certainly bears his characteristic refinement and attention to detail. But with the buildings having sat unused for almost 20 years now, its difficult to say if a rehabilitation project is feasible or cost-prohibitive.
As yet, no firm plan has been established for how Seaside State Park will be developed in the coming years. The fate of the old sanatorium is just as uncertain as that of the earliest tuberculosis patients that it housed so long ago. But the seashore itself is, and will probably remain, much like it has been from the beginning. As the waters faithfully rap away at rock jetties during sunrise, its easy to be lulled into a contemplative tranquility by the uncomplicated beauty of The Sound. But we must not forget the droves of unfortunate souls who once called The Seaside home. These were the reassuring summertime vistas to which they arose in the morning… this was the tempestuous coast whose storms sometimes kept them awake at night. For some 60 years, this place was the abode of those who were dealt a rough hand; most have been forgotten, but they remain bound up in these sands and waters and their stories are whispered in the hush between breaking waves.
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