(FACTS AND MEMORIES)

The farm house of my family was located in Harwinton, near "Castle Bridge", along the old Naugatuck Valley river road known as "The "Thomaston-Torrington Road" or "Route #8". About a mile and a half northerly up the valley along the old highway was the home of my very best friend Ralph, who lived in Campville's center in the well preserved large old brick house with the sign out front that read " Maple Grove Inn -1814".

Ralph and I, as the best of friends, grammar school class mates, and attendees of Harwinton's District #7 Campville School during the early to mid 1930s, often traveled on foot or by bicycle back and forth the mile and a half between our respective homes, to spend the night, do chores, go swimming, or investigate the world together.

About a thousand feet or so southerly of "Maple Grove Inn" and about a mile northerly of my home, was a large un-occupied and seemingly unused but well maintained old building standing close to the highway, that we knew as the "Lockwood Shop" and/or "The Hopkin's & Alfred Clock Shop". During a couple of our get-togethers, Ralph and I found a way to enter the old building through the basement, to "see what we could see".

We were not out to do damage, and did none. We were merely curious about what the building might contain. I now have only vague memories of some bins containing new small wooden pieces that I came to believe were clock gears and other parts. I remember little else, other than an old contrivance with a big horn and cylindrical records therewith, that we believed was an ancient phonograph. We tried to make it "play", but had no luck.

As the years went by, we often traveled by the old building during our comings and goings, but gave little thought to the building. It was just there. Then some twenty years after our early investigation of the building's interior, along came the flood of 1955. The building stood high and dry and safe from the flood waters, but not from the Corps of Army Engineers and its plans to build the "Thomaston Flood Control Dam" and create the great dry reservoir basin behind it.

All the homes, buildings and people had to leave the valley. The roads, the railroad, and all utilities were relocated or taken away. Although the homes in the center of Campville no longer remained, the Town of Harwinton prevailed upon the COE to allow the mile and a half section of the old Thomaston to Torrington Road that passed the Hopkins & Alfred Mill (now named Valley Road), from Campville Hill Road southerly to Wildcat Hill Road, to remain open as a Town Highway.

Along about 1958 a crew of workmen carefully dismantled the one hundred and twenty-five year old mill. We were told that it was to be re-erected in the Smithsonian in Washington, DC.

A few year later during a trip to Washinton with my family, we went in search of the mill. What had finally happened to the bulk of the remains of the mill, I don't know; but within the Smithsonian, my children and I found, as part of an industrial exhibit, a small portion of the building with some work benches and equipment that was labeled as "an example of an early Harwinton, CT machine shop."

With the opportunities we had as children, I do wish my friend Ralph and I had had the where with all to have paid more attention and taken pictures of the internals of the old "Hopkins & Alfred Clock Shop", where all those clocks with wooden internals had been made!

LTS 12/10/00

Lloyd T Shanley, Harwinton Town Historian, ltshanley@snet.net