Meekertown’s ‘Moral Darkness’
January 22, 2007 on 9:40 am | In Local, Main |
Reader and Lakeville Journal contributor Dick Paddock sent me this photo referring to the abandoned hamlet of Meekertown, which is in the area of Canaan Mountain.
The quote is from Deacon Minor of Norfolk describing the village of coal burners he visited: “I found a hamlet of heathens living in moral, intellectual and spiritual darkness”.
The words are now on a plaque in the Yale Forestry School camp. It is the handiwork of Jody Bronson, forest manager for the Great Mountain Forest. Evidently (or at least in the view of the deacon), the denizens of Meekertown left a lot to be desired.
A noted railroad buff and local historian, Dick wrote another one of his great “Rail Tales” columns for us this week. Dick is a retired computer engineer for IBM and so has a keen eye for detail — and a sense of humor to match.
He has been rummaging around the archives of the old Connecticut Western News, which published all the news about the Northwest Corner that was fit to print before The Lakeville Journal was founded in 1897.
The subject of the column is the science (or art) of absconding via rail and it’s most amusing. Part of it concerns a scruffy, 19th-century coal-burning Meekertonian named Edward Q. Boinay, whose wife took the kids and eloped to Millerton via rail with one of Boinay’s hired hands.
I’m not sure what a coal-burner does — aside from the obvious — but I’m fairly certain it something to do with the gritty and ubiquitous iron industry. I can only imagine what Boinay and his “coal bush” must have looked, sounded and smelled like. Perhaps Deacon Minor’s description was too kind …
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“Coal burner” was shorthand for “charcoal burner”, and of course you are correct that this was integral to the iron industry — as most everything was around here a century or so ago. (By the way, if the Lakeville Journal had been around before 1846 or so, your paper would have had the euphonious name of the “Furnace Village Journal” — just as an indication of how the iron industry dominated the area.)
What a charcoal burner did, in a nutshell, was cut trees, stack them into a relatively air-tight pile, and burn them in a way that controlled the amount of oxygen that could get in, to make charcoal for the blast furnaces that dotted the landscape.
It was particularly hard, particularly dirty, particularly hazardous work — imagine falling into the top of a burning charcoal pit you had climbed on to tamp down; generally fatal, but fatal much slower than falling into the top of a blast furnace you had been charging from the top!
Anyway, charcoal burning is a topic about which lots of people around here know much more than I do, and I hope they will check in with their additional knowledge.
Geoff Brown
Comment by Geoff Brown — January 22, 2007 #
Well, I’ve read Dick Paddock’s excellent article, finding it most illuminating, as I typically find his discoveries to be.
One correction: in Dick’s byline he says he “volunteers at Beckley Furnace”. I can say, from my own experiences at Beckley, that this is an understatement. Dick is one of the most dependable and energetic volunteers the Friends of Beckley Furnace have. Furthermore, he always to seem to be coming up with something new and tittilating — at least to people with an interest in the Salisbury iron district and its history.
Geoff Brown
another Twin Lakes resident, and a sometime Beckley Furnace volunteer
Comment by Geoff Brown — January 23, 2007 #