High Water '96 Symbology Page
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A Water Street Mill still standing.
One of the mills still left standing along the rapids area of the sugar river between two dams. Back in 1997, I talked with the Claremont mayor who saved it. A lot of money had been spent stabilizing this and other mill buildings along Water Street. Many other mills were lost because it was just too costly for the City of just over thirteen thousand to save them all, and they would have simply become too dangerous.
Eventually, this mill will perhaps be restored and apparently be used by a business. As soon as I find out more, I'll include the updates on this and other pages.
The roof actually is slightly slanted as it appears in the painting, perhaps in order to allow the inordinately copious winter snow accumulations in this part of New England to travel of the edge and the snow pack tends to glaciate and move around the month of March. It's really the snow melt that is causing the river to be so active in this painting.
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Entrance to Mill on river side.
It's hard to see this from this perspective and on an inclement day such as this, but this is actually an indentation angled into the side of the building with the entire corner of the structure held in place by a large metal beam which can be seen as a dark blue thick line
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The Love Building
The center factory in the painting is the Love Building. I understand it to be vacant now, but it still has it's own operable hydro electric power supply coming from a dam which can't be seen here as it would be behind those huge rocks.
My neighbor across the street from me worked there in the early half to the twentieth century when it was a steel mill.
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Steam clouds.
The City of Claremont still gets electricity from the river. Although the cost of electricity here is the greatest in the Nation (well, at least before the California crisis; I'll have to re-authenticate that), the Sugar river, to a small degree, contributes to the electric current.
Over the roof of the Love Building, you can see steam from the waters from another dam obscured by the edifice. This happens in cold weather and even can occur around the time of the thaws, which also are the time of the maple sugar harvests throughout the New England area, incidentally.
Maple sugar and honey were some of the sweeteners used in the colonial days before replaced by sugar.
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Footbridge.
Barely visible in this painting, you can see the delicate lattice of all that remains of the well-traveled foot bridge which the factory workers used to get across the river to work from the Washington Street side of Claremont in the eighteen hundreds.
Now all that's left is a slender rusted framework. It has yet a future, though, as eventually there are plans to have it rebuilt and tourists from the visitor center on the other side of the river (which is already mostly built circa two thousand and one) will be able to walk across to visit the mill.
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The Sugar River.
If the Sugar River, seen in the paintings as a darker blue green than it actually appeared in the real scene, were always this high and active, it would be formidable indeed. But rather, especially during the dryer summer months while the whole American east coast bakes under the frequent Bermuda High pressure cells that hover over the section of the continent for weeks at a time, the river is reduced to a trickle at it's bottom.
It got it's name from the prevolence of sugar maple which in colonial times was in demand as a resource for maple sugar.
In reality the river at one time ran red from all the dye dumped in by wool mills upstream.
Of course, this is also because of it's many dams along it's course which also helps to form a large lake at it's source: Lake Sunapee.
Still and all, high or low, the flow of water over this section for rapids which at any time make an awesome sight.
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First sedimentary rock
This point which protrudes into the stream a bit is actually this color, especially when wet. It seems to be a form of sedimentary rock formed at a different period of time from the bluish massive rock next to it.
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Second (blue) sedimentary rock.
Next to the reddish brown sedimentary rock is one that is distinctly blue in color. This is a magnificent and beautiful outcropping of stone which I have climbed to the river bed during the dryer months.
Eventually I found it impossible just to do the painting from my tiny photograph, and found myself having to visit the scene to actually spend the better part of a summer's day examining my subject. And I'm glad I did. I'm sure my enthusiasm was entirely too ostentatious.
The rock was almost a cupuric blue. I kept a small piece of it and have it with me here somewhere in my room, long since buried in my own little local vortex of time under a couple of years of papers and catalogues.
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Trees and vegetation on top of the rocks.
The rock outcropping is so massive that it has soil on top and sports a growth of vegetation and trees. These trees almost look out of place, but are holding their own and doing pretty well as if to serve as a woody coiffure for the blue and brown boulders.
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A man-made wall.
Also holding the torrent of this spring ninety-six thaw is a wall, two thirds of which is submerged in this scene. I don't know how old this man-made structure is, but it certainly is doing it's job in this picture!
To my surprise, as I painted it, knot knowing what it was until I went there later to inspect the area, I found myself painting this section in the style of Paul Cézanne, and artist whom I admired but never expected to emulate in painting.
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Sullivan's phantom factory
As has become sadly usual with me, I find myself less and less able to remember details. This part of the scene is an area where a mishap occurred the exact time of which I knew from a conversation with and observer but since have forgotten exactly when the person said it had occurred. I think it was in the nineteen forties or so.
This was once the location of a factory called, I think, "Sullivan's" factory. Anyway, just before that fateful day the factory had become a depot and storage facility for some pretty potent stuff, whatever it was!
The day it caught fire, it burned so hot they couldn't put it out. So they let it go and it burned day and night and even longer, I think. The end result is what you see in the midground between the rocks and the hills on the other side. Nothing but some bits of framework and the stack remain.
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Sullivan's Smoke Stack.
So there, towering over nothing much, standing alone like the Eiffel Tower of Claremont, is Sullivan's Smoke Stack, now the monolith of a bygone era.
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Housing area on hilltop.
This hilltop I have traveled many times in the old Subaru on the roof of which I even stood in that spot (where you might barely be able to make out a grayish two story house on that hill top, on the street in front of that) to get a photograph of the area this painting is looking from.
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Housing area and road going uphill in central background.
Here are other housing areas in the mid distance along with a road that goes up a hill. Beyond is the area of West Claremont, not yet separate, but a growing edge of town.
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Mount Ascutney.
In the distance, emerging from the mist and fog of this cloudy foggy day just after a rain storm, is one of the small but majestic mountains of Vermont. Vermont has large mountains, but this is one of it's smaller ones: Mount Ascutney.
On the slope opposite this view, there actually is a very nice ski resort and groomed slopes, a part of Vermont and New Hampshire's winter sports industry.
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