Early industrial artifacts found ‘vastly untapped’ in Emery Park

KENT — Emery Park is experiencing a revival, with projects underway or soon to debut — including a renovated swimming pond, newly opened hiking trails, a public campground, and a mountain-top lookout tower — each promising to breathe new life into its open fields and rugged hillsides.

Long ago, the 200-acre parcel was home to a much tougher breed than today’s hikers and campers — the charcoal burners who once kept western Connecticut’s iron furnaces alive.

While Kent’s involvement in the iron industry is well chronicled, the traces of this specific site — its fireplaces, talus shelters, charcoal mounds, and old foundations — remained largely undiscovered until this fall.

In mid-September, Kent Parks and Recreation Director Matthew Busse invited Sarah Sportman, the state’s official archeologist, for a tour of the woods. After six hours tromping through the park’s steep, densely forested hillsides, the duo was confident that Emery Park would soon have another attraction to add to its growing resumé: archeological dig site.

“Just walking through, we realized this area was so vastly untapped,” Busse reported to the Parks and Recreation Commission during its Oct. 7 meeting.

Sportman agreed with Busse’s assessment: “Taken all together, it could be kind of a significant landscape related to early industry in the state.”

Sportman said that although the iron industry is a well-known part of the state’s history, it — alongside the charcoal burners, known as colliers, who fueled the iron production of the 18th and 19th centuries — remains an under researched topic in the state’s archeological record.

After visiting Emery Park, she said the site was promising for a number of reasons. “It’s preserved as a park, right? So there are a lot of cultural features there that have been untouched by any kind of development or interference, so they’re intact,” Sportman explained. “Charcoal mounds, remnant roads from the old industry — and then there are those fireplaces that are really interesting.”

Busse retraced a shorter version of his tour with Sportman. Trudging up the steep blue trail, known as the “Collier’s Climb” for its history as a roadway for coal burners lugging supplies and product up and down the mountain, Busse identified vestiges of a bygone way of life, some subtle and others more obvious.

He pointed out a pile of large stones in the woods: a fireplace he found himself this June despite being located only 20 feet off the trail. On the path’s border, he brushed away some leaves on a rounded bulge on the forest floor to reveal black, earthy soil stained by the centuries-old smoldering of a collier’s fire. “You can smell it,” he said as he rubbed the dirt between his fingers.

Busse said he’s aware of six fireplaces still standing on the property, as well as at least 32 charcoal mounds , where colliers would have kept long hours ensuring that the blaze, contained in a robust conical structure made of timber beams, stayed at a low burn and didn’t destroy the coal harvest. “It was a lonely, solemn job,” Busse said. “So kudos to them.”

The fireplaces range from vague piles of stones like the one off the blue trail to big, obvious oven-shaped structures made of huge round rocks. Many are located near or attached to an old building foundation. These may have been semi-permanent dwellings where colliers spent time during shifts up on the mountain.

Sportman said it’s likely many of the structures in the area are related, but it’s too early in the discovery process to make any certain connections. In any case, she said, the site clearly had an element of organization and intensive labor in its planning. Her next steps will be to figure out if and how it all worked together, using an array of archeological methods.

She and Busse are also planning on registering the hillside sites with the state, mapping the complex in greater detail, and maybe even digging some pits to look for clues that could help date some of the structures. Busse said he hopes to bring in volunteers from town in this next stage, maybe even incorporating an educational element for students at Kent Center School.

Busse said that it’s the unknown component of the discovery that excites him, and that he hopes will capture the curiosity of townsfolk as well. While showing a particularly well-preserved fireplace high on the summit of Segar Mountain, he gestured at the structure and said, “Not much is known…” — then he cut himself off.

“That phrase is thrown about here way too much,” he said with a grin. “It’s awesome!”