A River’s Journey

Story by Steve Silk | Photo by Richard Wagner

It would be nice to say the Farmington River is unique in all the world, it just wouldn’t be true.

But the river is unusual. Very unusual.

It may be the only one in the northern hemisphere to flow every which way. The Farmington tumbles south, wanders west, churns east, and glides north.

But don’t jump to conclusions.

That apparent aimlessness doesn’t suggest the river has lost its way, no. The Farmington is on course, flowing straight through the pages of a storybook.

It helps to know the language if you want to read its many tales. Just as the river flows up, down and sideways on the map, it speaks in many dialects. But to the fishermen, archaeologists, paddlers, scientists and historians who understand its babbling speech, the Farmington tells plenty of stories.

After all, a lot has happened here. Along the river’s banks, dinosaurs once munched lush vegetation, and post Ice-Age settlers hunted caribou at a time millennia ago — when the Farmington Valley looked like arctic tundra. More recently, its water powered the Collinsville factory that made the lethal-looking pikes which abolitionist John Brown planned to issue to a slave army he hoped would rise when he and his men took over an arsenal in Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia. And that’s just the start.

Rising at the eastern edge of the Berkshires in Becket, Massachusetts, the Farmington meanders 81 leisurely miles to debouch in the Connecticut River in Windsor. Along the way it crashes through several wild-looking gorges, ambles lazily past fertile farmlands, and, here and there, gets bombarded by errant golf balls. With condos and shopping centers along its banks, the Farmington is a suburban stream, but one with attitude, where bald eagles sometimes soar. One of its finest stretches, the 14-mile run from Hartland to the New Hartford/Canton town line, has been designated a part of the National Wild and Scenic Rivers System; a status enjoyed by only five other waterways in New England. The entire downstream stretch from there is currently under a National Park Service study; it too may be on the path to Wild and Scenic status by next year.

The river’s scenic status — and its storytelling capability — is certainly not news to fly fisherman Don Butler, a Terryville resident who’s been fishing the Farmington — and reading its waters — since, well, let’s just say for a long time. You could find him out casting a line almost any day of the year — Butler’s known for catching at least one trout a month on a dry fly for 83 months in a row, a lucky streak just shy of eight years.

Butler can often be found near New Hartford at the Bone Yard, where a riffle of whitewater exhausts itself in a broad, dark pool. There, he waves his fly rod like a magic wand, conjuring fish to rise to his homemade fly. Fishing is so good at the Bone Yard that Butler has hauled in as many as 30 trout in a couple hours. One reason there’s so much action, he says, is the state DEP’s distinctive method for stocking the river. “They call it the survival program,” Butler says. “They’re taking healthy happy fish out of the element they love, and then stocking their offspring right back in the same area.”

It all adds up to lots of fish, and lots of fishermen. The Farmington River Watersshed Association estimates nearly 100,000 angler visits a year to the Wild and Scenic stretch alone. Butler, who works as a guide for Upcountry Sport Fishing in New Hartford, says, “I’ve guided people from Japan, Australia, Germany and that other foreign country, California.” New Yorkers, too, are discovering the Farmington. Butler says they started turning up in greater numbers after 9/11, discovered what a great fishery the river was, and kept coming back.

The sense of refuge fly-rod toting New Yorkers find in the Farmington and its valley is shared by many. The whole watershed is laced with trails, dotted with mountains to climb, historic towns, and an abundance of natural beauty. “Here’s this river running right through suburbia, but it’s more a place of solace, a place where you can get away a bit,” says Eric Hammerling, executive director of the watershed association, a Simsbury-based non-profit organization that works to protect the river and help restore its resources. “The river,” he says, “helps people get in touch with their non-business-world selves.”

Hammerling gets in touch with his real-world self in a few special spots. One is along the river near Collinsville. “I start at the axe factory, then walk along the Burlington Rail Trail. It’s a scene of the river’s industrial history.’’ A century and a half ago the river told another story. Then feltmakers, tanners, wool dyers, spoonmakers, and ironmongers worked along its banks in factories powered by the river’s waters. The mighty Collins Company alone built 1,300 different kinds of edged tools — from axes to bayonets — that were shipped all over the world. It began in 1826 and stayed in business until the Great Flood of 1955. Back in the river’s industrial heyday, there were so many canals, millraces and the like — the watershed still has more than 400 dams — that contemporary maps made it look almost like a different watershed, Hammerling says.

Speaking of canals, the Farmington was the site of a doomed business venture in the mid 1800s. Seeking a cheaper way to export the region’s foodstuffs, lumber and hides and to import machinery and merchandise, and at the same time boost activity at New Haven’s wharves, entrepreneurs teamed up to build a canal linking the river with New Haven and started digging in 1825. The Farmington-New Haven portion opened three years later; by 1835, a 70-mile canal — New England‘s longest — linked Northampton and New Haven. It proved expensive to maintain; ice locked the canal shut in winter and in 1845 drought closed it down for most of the summer. By 1847 the canal went out of business; it couldn’t compete with the railroad. In fact, it was eventually replaced by one, which ran until 1982 and was recently converted to the 25–mile Farmington Valley Greenway, a freeway for bikers, skaters, and hikers. The Collinsville stretch is where Hammerling likes to stroll.

Another of Hammerling’s river pursuits is drifting in a canoe along the slow water stretch of river from Route 4 in Farmington to the Pinchot Sycamore, the massive, white-flecked tree at the head of Nod Road in Simsbury. That arboreal giant spreads its twisted, muscular branches benevolently over the river. “You get a sense of the magnitude of life there, but it’s also a great place to experience the river,” he says.

There are other fine places to drift along the river, or if you’re a whitewater canoeist or kayaker, to challenge the rapids. The most famous spot is Tariffville Gorge, one of the few places in southern New England to offer good whitewater boating all summer long. Several U.S. Olympic Team whitewater slalom trials have been held there.

Looking up from a kayak while bobbing in a riverside eddy in the gorge, a boater would be hard pressed to read the incredible story its sheer rock walls reveal. The whole of the valley, in fact, has an amazing ancient past. Basically it’s an old scar, hundreds of millions of years old, left over from the break-up of Pangaea, the primeval supercontinent that fractured in the long ago past to form today’s seven continents. Not long after that initial rift, the area that would one day be Connecticut was maybe a thousand miles wide. Over eons of geologic time, the continental bump and grind we know today as plate tectonics mashed Connecticut into its present-day size. The ancient canyon, or rift valley, left by the breakup eventually filled in with debris from the eroding Appalachians, which, back in the day, were big as Mount Everest. Our climate then was significantly warmer — there were monsoons, and dinosaurs munched tropical vegetation. Then there were the lava flows, three of them over the millenia, each vaporizing every living thing in the valley. You can still make out the layers of lava in some of the bare rock faces of the Metacomet Ridge.

Later, much later, came the ice. Roughly 20,000 years ago, Connecticut—all of it — was under more than a mile of the stuff. A lot of debris got dragged around under the Ice Age glaciers, enough to form a massive dam near present day Farmington. The barrier halted the river’s southerly flow — until then it had flowed into the Quinnipiac River. As the glaciers melted, the water backed up higher and higher, creating a massive lake, Lake Hitchcock, that extended over most of the valley. As the water level slowly climbed up the ridge, it found a soft spot, and punched through to form Tariffville Gorge. The lake’s contents gushed out through that little breach, and when it was all over, the Farmington River had changed course; it now flowed north from the former glacial dam, then east through the gorge, and on into the Connecticut River.

At least that’s the story the river and its gorge tell a geologist. An archaeologist might see a different tale, that of the proto-Americans who moved into the valley shortly after the lake drained, when the landscape looked, according to studies of ancient pollen found there, more like arctic taiga. Then there were no hardwood forests. Even the seasons were different. Those first settlers probably hunted caribou. They may also have hunted the American mastodon, an ancient elephant relative; the bones of one were discovered 95 years ago on the grounds of the Hill-Stead Museum in Farmington.

But those Stone Age settlers were here. Just ask Ken Feder, a professor of anthropology at Central Connecticut State University. When the Simsbury resident was a student, he drove over the Farmington every day, and asked his mentors if the valley might be a good place for archaeological research. No, he was told. It’s a small river, people just passed through. Don’t expect much, they said.

But Feder perservered, and discovered the valley was in fact a hotbed of ancient settlement. He’s been involved in the evaluation of more than 100 valley sites, and has excavated about 20. He’s learned the locals knapped arrowheads and spear points from hornfels, a kind of hyperheated, glasslike stone formed when those ancient lava flows fired the local sandstone as if it was so much pottery. They lived in small villages, hunting and gathering for their sustenance. Agriculture entered the picture recently, around 1300. Not long afterwards the Europeans arrived, bringing with them diseases that caused a population meltdown for those first Americans.

Our archaeological record doesn’t end there though. For decades after the Europeans’ arrival, the valley was the raw edge of a new frontier. And it was a wild and wooly place. Satan’s Kingdom in Canton is named for a multiracial gang of thieves and ne’er-do-wells for whom the chasm was both home and hideout. Farther out in the wilderness, near what is now Riverton, lie the remains of an old settlement founded by an unhappy Wethersfield maiden and the Narragansett Indian with whom she eloped about 1750. Molly and James Chaugham set out for the edge of civilization, built a crude cabin — described as halfway between a woodpile and rail fence — near the base of Ragged Mountain. They lived there and raised their eight children near the old stagecoach road running between Hartford and Albany. At night, firelight glimmered through the windows and poorly chinked walls of their cabin, and passing coachmen came to think of it as a landmark. When they saw its light, they’d shout to their passengers that it was only 5 miles to New Hartford. The cabin, and the little settlement that eventually rose around it, came to be known as the Barkhamsted Lighthouse. Feder studied the site between 1986 and 1993, and verified much of the legend. The hamlet was occupied until 1860, and the remains of about a dozen of its old cellarholes can still be seen just in People’s State Forest, at the foot of the Jessie Gerard Trail leading up the mountain. According to the story, James Chaugham would climb Ragged Mountain when he suspected hostile tribes might be planning attacks on nearby settlers. He’d hike up to a series of rocky mountaintop bluffs and build a signal fire to warn them. Chaugham’s Overlook is an idyllic spot, with pristine views stretching for miles across hills and valleys. There’s hardly a house or road to be seen. It’s just as it might have looked when James Chaugham lit one of his signal fires. Down below, in a fold of the landscape, a sliver of the river glints in the sun. All in all, it’s a perfect spot to contemplate the Farmington, the river of stories.

Steve Silk is a writer and garden designer who lives in Farmington. He is a frequent contributor to Seasons.