100 years of electricity from power station in Falls Village

FALLS VILLAGE — The brick, steel and glass station on the east bank of the Housatonic River below the Amesville Bridge has generated electricity for 100 years. Built by Connecticut Power Co., it today is under the umbrella of FirstLight Power Resources, a subsidiary of GDF Suez Energy North America. The now 10-megawatt facility went on line May 26, 1914.As part of the Falls Village power plant’s centennial celebration, Richard Laudenat, plant manager for FirstLight, in May presented $500 checks to the Falls Village Historical Society and the David M. Hunt Library.The story of the water privileges at the Great Falls begins in the 19th century. Grist and fulling mills and other small industries on both sides of the river took advantage of the flow upstream of the falls. The river was bridged in about 1744. Amesville emerged on the Salisbury side, first with an iron furnace, then with Horatio Ames’ foundry and later with a Housatonic Railroad repair shop.On the Falls Village riverbank, entrepreneurs Samuel S. Robbins and Lee Canfield, who had operated the Holley Coffing iron furnace in Lime Rock in the 1830s, in 1845 established the Water Power Co. and planned a one-mile canal that would take water from the top of the Great Falls downstream to provide flow to several industries.Canfield and Robbins sold $200,000 worth of stock, purchased water rights and appointed E.L. Goldsmith as superintendent of works. They began to build the canal in 1849. Proximity to the railroad was seen as a selling point. They finished work in 1851.“They constructed a dam some four or five feet high across the river above the rapids and diverted the water on the east bank into a large canal about 80 feet in width by 8 or 10 in depth. This ran about a quarter of a mile and then there were gates and locks constructed to carry the water into a supplementary canal about 30 feet lower. There is also room to put a third canal and if the entire water power was developed there are from 12,000 to 15,000 horse power,” according to the New Haven Register for Jan. 7, 1893.The channel was dry-laid with stone. When Canfield and Robbins opened the gates, as Malcolm Day Rudd described it in Connecticut Magazine in 1903, “water squirted from leaks all along the canal and sank the enterprise.” Despite repairs, old investors withdrew and new ones were wary. The Panic of 1857 helped not at all. And the division of the town into Canaan (Falls Village) and North Canaan in 1858 meant North Canaan businessmen had their own interests to look out for. The canal project floundered. The upper two levels of the canal survive today, and are part of a second story decades later: construction of a hydro-electric generating station.u u u“This year’s summer boarders at Falls Village, Conn., have found that a once sleepy vacation resort has assumed the aspects of a busy industrial community,” the trade journal Electrical Record noted in May 1915. “Above the murmur of Great Falls rises the shriek of donkey engines, the creak of derricks and the shouts of scores of teamsters. Main Street, in years past an exclusive roadway for farmers’ wagons, has become a thoroughfare for rattling loads of construction material; while ‘The Inn,’ once the stronghold of vacationists, has completely surrendered to leggined, khaki-trousered men.”By the time that report had appeared, construction was completed. The magazine explained the canal had sufficient pondage to provide a continuous flow of 243 cubic feet per second for 24 hours — plenty to generate electricity. “Falls Village was selected as the site of the hydro-electric plant because the contour of the Housatonic River was particularly desirable at this point, two falls, Little Falls and Great Falls, giving a hydraulic drop of 110 feet,” Electrical World said in its March 3, 1917, issue.“Connecticut Power Co., to supply a hydro-generating station, built a 15-foot-high, 320-foot-wide concrete gravity-type dam just above Great Falls with a base width of 22 feet,” explained another magazine, Electrical Record. A skimming gate removed river drift before it entered the canal, which had four main headgates “with submerged orifices 10 feet wide and 5 feet deep. The gates are both hand and motor operated.”The old walls were now reinforced with concrete and raised 4.5 feet to serve as an open penstock.Once in service, Electrical World explained, the plant supplied “6600-volt transmission lines reaching the towns of Millerton, N.Y., and [North] Canaan, Norfolk, Lime Rock, Falls Village and Sharon, Conn., while 66,000-volt steel-tower lines run to Torrington, Thomaston, Bristol, New Britain and Hartford, Conn.”The journal took readers inside the station: “In the middle bay on the main floor are the turbine-driven exciters, governor oil pumps, oil-storage tanks and heating plant. Mounted directly over each exciter are chain-operated rheostats actuated from the switchboard above. Space is provided on each side of the central bay for two 5000-hp. Water turbine-driven generators with their corresponding governor mechanism, but only three units are installed so far [in 1917]. Since the turbines are horizontal-shaft, end-entrance units, rear-bearing inspection chambers are provided at the penstock ends. “Extending the whole length of the generator room along the penstock side is a gallery on the central portion of which, over the exciter pit, are the main switchboard and 6600-volt switch and bus structure. A telephone booth is located at one end of the switchboard that an operator using the telephone can see every instrument and switch on the board. At each end of the gallery are separate fireproof compartments with metal doors for the transformers. Back of these is space for a machine shop, office, station-service equipment, storeroom and the like. All of the high-tension equipment—that is, the 66,000-volt apparatus, including oil switches— is installed in a room over the gallery.”Stone & Webster Engineering Corp. constructed the plant. Stone & Webster Management Association was the initial operator. M.L. Sperry was district manager of Connecticut Power Co., Henry E. Lyles was division manager of the Housatonic division. And J.K. Mackie was superintendent of the Falls Village plant.u u uThis area of southwestern New England has a sterling history in the development of electricity. Inventor William Stanley Jr., under contract to George Westinghouse, demonstrated the viability of transmitting alternating-current electricity in Great Barrington, Mass., in spring 1886. Seven years later, with a new manufacturing business in Pittsfield, Stanley contracted to install a hydro-generating plant on the Housatonic River in the Alger Furnace section of Stockbridge, Mass. In 1893, it supplied Monument Mills in Housatonic village, and surplus was wired into Great Barrington. Area towns became anxious to have electricity — at first for lights, but soon to operate engines and machinery.A native of Sheffield, Mass., lawyer and eventual chairman of the Connecticut Republican Party, John Henry Roraback pioneered in electricity production and distribution in the Northwest Corner. He organized Berkshire Power Co. in North Canaan in 1905 and built a hydro plant in the northwest part of town, on the Housatonic at the Weatogue section of Salisbury. Roraback’s Berkshire soon folded in Norfolk Electric Light & Power Co. and Sharon Electric Light Co. (which had a station at Mudge Pond) and took on franchises for Norfolk, Falls Village, North Canaan (including East Canaan), Salisbury (with a spur line to North East and Millerton, N.Y.) and Sharon. Roraback with engineer and businessman David B. Carse in 1907 purchased land on the Housatonic River at Cornwall and Sharon and secured state permission to construct a hydro-electric plant. That project never came about. Housatonic Power Co. in 1915 acquired New Milford Power Co. In 1917, it sold all its franchises to the Rocky River Power Co., another Roraback endeavor. At the same time, the company changed its name to Connecticut Light & Power Co. Roraback was president of CL&P from 1925 until his death in 1937.This material is adapted from the writer’s “18th and 19th Century Waterpowered Industry in the Upper Housatonic River Valley,” a research project underwritten by the Upper Housatonic Valley National Heritage Area and planned for publication this year.