Community, Culture, and Industrial Ecology

The people who settied northwestern Connecticut created an agricultural surplus that allowed them to undertake industrial ventures within a few years of their arrival. Their knowledge of the mechanical arts, coupled with the region’s natural resources, gave them opportunities to make material goods needed by their neighbors. Successive generations continued industrial use of the region’s natural resources over the next two centuries, each making its own choices about how to structure its enterprise within the framework of values and beliefs held separately by individuals and in common within the community. Each had to respond to changes in markets and the advent of new products and techniques. These opportunities, and the participants’ choices about how to use them, combined to create the region’s industrial ecology. Like the rest of the New England hill country, northwestern Connecticut had two abundant, renewable natural resources: streams with steep gradients and reliable flow for waterpower, and forest that covered the large areas that were too steep or too thinly mantled with soil for decent pasture. Millwrights could easily build waterpower systems on the streams, and farmers could manage the forest for continuous production of fuel wood, since it regrew trees to useful size within about twenty years. Unlike other highlands, however, northwestern Connecticut had a unique mineral resource: iron ore beds unmatched elsewhere in New England. Everyone in the newly settled lands and on the frontiers expanding into Vermont and New York in the early eighteenth century needed iron products. As described in chapter 3, individuals throughout the Salisbury district, aided by family members or fluid partnerships, built bloomery forges that they operated as components of their cropping, husbandry, or mercantile enterprises. Nearly every family in Kent and the other new towns had a partner in one of the forges. Individuals lacking metallurgical skills or access to any capital dug ore or cut wood. Others developed their skills as colliers or millwrights. Negotiated exchanges of labor and services among these artisans promoted interdependence within the community. As the colonists in southern New England increasingly mechanized their grain, timber, and cloth production in the mid—eighteenth century, they brought a new opportunity to the ironmakers of the Salisbury disno trict. By making standard parts for grain mills, sawmills, fulling mills, and oil mills that they could distribute widely, Salisbury ironmakers added value to the bar iron they made and enlarged the scope of their market.