Reposted from the Shorelinetimes.com
Thursday, October 20, 2011
By Lisa Reisman
Special to the Times
BRANFORD – In a row of mismatched chairs poised to be auctioned off at a garden party on a crisp evening in Stony Creek, one stood apart.
It might not have been the most colorful or elaborately adorned or ergonomically correct. But it went to the essence of the village and its history.
It was a simple chair, the legs and back composed of driftwood — “pre-Irene,” said Max Whalen who, along with Colin Newton, handcrafted it — the seat of granite, the whole held together by railroad nails. This wasn’t just any driftwood or granite or railroad nails, though. As a tag hanging from the top slat of driftwood attested, the chair was made from “only materials in Stony Creek.” Not just the materials: Whalen and Newton were themselves born and bred in Stony Creek.
The chair, in short, might not have been perfectly beveled and squared. It was, however, in precise conformity with the mission of the early-October gathering on the picturesque grounds at the estate of Francine Farkas Sears, the president of Fabrique Ltd./Women in Business: to raise funds for the Stony Creek Museum.
According to Ted Ells, a member of the museum committee and himself a fourth-generation Creeker —he lives in the house his great-great-grandfather built — the non-profit, member-based museum will occupy the former St. Therese Church and will display “a love of the town, a celebration of all aspects of its rich history, and an understanding of what the town used to be like.”
Take the seat of granite cut from the local quarry by Whalen and Quinn. Yes, that same distinctive pink and orange granite is part of many of our nation’s great monuments, from Grant’s Tomb to the Taft Monument in Arlington, Va. to the base of the Statue of Liberty.
Still, what gets lost in the sheer range of its illustrious uses is the vibrant nature of the quarry industry and the village that produced the granite, said Branford First Selection Anthony “Unk” DaRos, who was among the 75 guests at the event. “It really was something in its day.”
DaRos would know. A fourth-generation Creeker like Ells, his own family was among the hundreds of immigrants employed in the 1870s once quarry operators realized its potential for wealth and the need for labor.
At its height, Stony Creek pulsated with roughly 1,800 quarrymen and their families. There were several grocery stores, a blacksmith shop and movie theater, a shoe store, two barber shops, a druggist, and nine saloons lining its streets. Which meant there was no need for the quarrymen and their families to leave for anything.
None of which would have been possible without the construction of the railroad, said DaRos. As with oystering, the other major business of Stony Creek’s history, the quarrying of granite didn’t take off until the railroad made shipping possible. And like the railroad nails that Whalen and Quinn used to affix the granite to the driftwood, the train adjoined new industry with the beginning of Stony Creek’s summer resort era.
By the turn of the century, New Yorkers were cramming trains headed to roughly five hotels that had sprung up in both the village and the Thimble Islands to accommodate them, according to Branford town historian Jan Peterson Bouley. The largest and most elegant, the Flying Point Hotel, which the Great Depression effectively closed, was located, ironically, not far frm the very site at which the fundraising festivities were in full swing at Sears’ seaside home.
An undated black-and-white postcard from Willoughy Wallace Memorial Library’s archives shows the balcony-tiered structure peopled with vacationers. It’s easy to imagine a family gathered on Adirondack chairs taking in a view of the Thimble Islands on a gentle summertime evening amid the distant rumble from the railroad as strains from the Stony Creek Fife and Drum Corps, founded in 1886, drifted through the sea-salt air.
That’s in part what the Stony Creek Museum will seek to evoke, said Ted Ells. Nearby, Dick Howd, whose family has been in Stony Creek since 1667 and whose father was the longtime owner and operator of the Thimble Island Ferry Service, merrily tended bar. “It’s a little village but we’ve had quite a history,” Ells said. “And there are a lot of people invested in preserving it.” Archiving and research are in the works, he added, as are interviews of longtime residents.
In the end, the chair did not win the highest bid. Still, its very presence brought home why, in the words of Sears, “Stony Creek is, to those who live here, a chosen place.”
Donations to the Stony Creek Museum may be sent to Stony Creek Museum, P.O. Box 3047, Stony Creek, CT 06405. For a chair handcrafted solely of materials from Stony Creek, contact Max Whalen at max@brendonwhalen.com.
