The River in anticlimatic

The house I live in and am restoring is undated, and I’ve always wondered when the oldest, forward part of the home was built. The rear portion of the basement is autographed and dated 1910, but that partition was added by a different builder, with different materials, and a very different building style.

The front of the house feels very “gilded age,” but the rear- the signed portion- has a very signature rickety wooden feel not unlike many cottages of the early 20th century. The way the plumbing in the house is just tacked on- like someone ran pipes up the back of the house, converted a regular upstairs closet to a water closet, built another section of house attached to the back to seal it in, and put a full bathroom in that section- it makes me think the original house predated plumbing.

It is in the oldest part of town. I found one photograph of my neighborhood dated 1900, with my house visible in the background. Clearly my house, though off in some surprising ways. No front porch. Some odd barn or tree or something I infuriatingly can’t discern directly to the right of it. And the chimney was in a different spot- running right out of the middle of the roof, not up the side like it is now.

I thought for sure that was the original chimney. Tore it down myself and had it rebuilt. But that’s the thing with this house- parts that seem oldest, aren’t.

The river is a central part of my neighborhood; a green paradise that feels as though it has always just been untouched nature. When my house was built, I think it was untouched nature as well....though in the interim, the river was converted into industrial waste land.

Water was the energy of choice when the town was formed. They dammed the river in 5 places over less than a mile or two stretch from the mouth. Each dam powered some kind of mill. There was a paper mill, a grist mill, a saw mill. The natives would come, and became dependent on the machinery for their endeavors. Ocassionally the mill owners would quarrel- one would run logs over another’s dam and damage it, and bad blood would get stirred up.

The first two families to settle here- the Porter family, and the Ingals family- each owned a mill and a dam just down from on another, became bitter rivals.

My house sits on a ridge overlooking the river directly between the spots their respective mills operated. It’s something else, witnessing how fast nature reclaimed the entire river area- but after looking closely after studying the old photographs posted on the history museum, I found at least one remnant- and the location- of every one of the old mills from the 1800s.

An odd concrete pattern in the grass near the McManus mill, when viewed on a map and compared to a map from 1890, is revealed to have been the base of the smoke stack. Crumbled foundation blocks embedded high in the bank of the river reveal themselves as the original footing of the paper mill dam. A stretch of spillway wall, and a giant cast iron water wheel center hub mark the location of the first dam and mill to come to ruin- as indicated on the 1908 Sanborn Fire Insurance map.

The maps prior to that, in the 1800s and earlier 1900s, had the mill drawn in great detail- with side notes. Night watchman. No running water. Water powered. Drying room. Cutting room. Etc. But come 1908, after skipping a few years, the mill was drawn as greyed out. No notes beyond this:

“old mill- in ruins”

In 1908. And still a little something left.

Last updated February 06, 2024