“A generation from now, this solar heater can either be a curiosity, a museum piece, an example of a road not taken, or it can just be a small part of one of the most exciting adventures ever undertaken by the American people — harnessing the power of the sun to enrich our lives as we move away from our crippling dependence on foreign oil.” President Jimmy Carter, June 20, 1979
NORFOLK — In 1979, at the height of a national energy crisis when OPEC countries limited the flow of oil to the West, U.S. President Jimmy Carter began a federal initiative to jumpstart the development and use of alternative energy. The goal of “Solar America” was that 20% of America’s energy would be renewable by the year 2000. Carter had solar panels installed on the roof of the White House to heat the water used in the West Wing.
Norfolk’s Tom Strumolo was on the original team that installed the 32 solar panels. He was part of a band of young, long-haired New England solar energy mavericks who made history.
As a recent Yale graduate, Strumolo was working in the new Energy Department in Hartford where he met Gordon Priess from Mystic, Connecticut. He was “a heat transfer guy who designed water heaters, and became chief engineer of the White House project,” according to Strumolo. They learned the White House was taking bids for a big solar installation, and their $50,000 bid was accepted.
Ed Butler, a Connecticut native, joined the crew. Butler and his partner Rick Schwolsky founded Sunrise Solar Services in Vermont in 1976. They gathered friends with skills necessary for the project. Students from a Groton, Connecticut, technical school welded the steel framework. They transported it to DC on a flatbed truck. The General Services Agency (GSA) installed 1” plywood to protect the entire White House lawn. A massive crane rolled in to lift the entire structure to the roof of the West Wing.
Strumolo laughed, recalling that security was very tight. “Our Secret Service detail told us ‘We shoot to kill,’ so we did not mess around.” They had sniffer dogs checking them out each day. When President and First Lady Rosalynn Carter climbed to the roof for an official photograph, Strumolo warned the President the paint was still wet on the metal. Carter said, “I am not going to mess up your paintjob!” Strumolo was more concerned about the President’s suit.
President Ronald Reagan had the solar panels removed from the White House in 1981. The parts were stored for years in a warehouse. The Reagan Administration reduced Carter’s renewable energy program by 90%. Half of the White House solar panels were moved to Unity College in Maine where they heated the water in the dining hall for 12 years. Some of the original solar panels reside in the Carter Museum and the National Museum of American History.
Tom Strumolo of Norfolk, founder Energy General LLC, was on the crew that installed solar panels on the roof of the White House for President Jimmy Carter in 1979.Jennifer Almquist
Jody Bronson, forester emeritus of Norfolk’s Great Mountain Forest (GMF), recalled, “Ed Butler’s team installed the solar panels on the White House for Jimmy Carter. My wife Jean and I have three of the panels that were supposedly installed on the White House. We can’t confirm this. In 1990 they were installed on our home in Falls Village by Ed Butler. The panels are still functional and have provided all the domestic hot water for our house for 35 years! If more households in our area had done this 30 or 40 years ago, think about how much energy they could have saved.” Bronson said there is a treasured can of “Billy Beer” in the Forestry Office at GMF.
Butler reminisced, “I was really excited when we won the bid to work on the solar project at President Jimmy Carter’s White House. It was such a great opportunity for a relatively small New England solar company. It was something I believed so strongly in and was proud to have been a part of it. Since 1976, we have done several hundred solar jobs in New England.”
Strumolo remains committed to “creating adequate and equitable responses to our changing climate.” He wrote “Decentralizing Energy Production” (Yale Press, 1983) and was a driving force behind the recently installed 13-acre solar array at the town’s transfer station. His energy audits have been used in thousands of buildings. After fifty years Strumolo is “still working, still on the path Carter inspired me to follow. There is so much work left to be done.” In 2008, artists from the Kunsthaus in Zurich created a film, “A Road Not Taken”, which will be shown at the Norfolk Library Feb. 15.
In the words of the late President Jimmy Carter, “Pessimism did not build America, it was built with vision, faith, and hard work. It is time to pull ourselves out of our national doldrums, to recognize our great untapped potential and resources, to build a more prosperous, self-reliant future.” Had the original solar panels remained in use on the White House they could have saved 20,000 gallons of heating oil.
First Lady Rosalynn Carter, Jim Butler (blue shirt), Ron Chick (with the hat), President Carter, Warren Herlein (with beard), Tom Strumolo (yellow shirt), Gordon Priess (sunglasses) with the newly installed solar panels on the roof of the White House in 1979.Photo provided by Tom Strumolo
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Izzy Fitch at Battle Hill Forge in Wassaic.
The giant metal mantis, built by artist Jim Hackett, is now part of a summer contest Fitch devised. He’ll strap it to the roof rack of his car and drive it around. When people spot it, they can take a photo, post it on social media and tag @battlehillforge, @lakevillejournal and @themillertonnews. At the end of the contest, names will be drawn at random and gift certificates to Battle Hill Forge will be awarded.
“It’s just for fun,” said Fitch, whose work often blurs the boundaries between art, utility and play. “Who couldn’t use more fun these days?”
Fitch moves through his sprawling workshop spaces like an enthusiastic museum guide leading visitors through a collection he forgot he owned. Every few steps, something catches his attention. A hand-forged daffodil. A dragonfly. A prototype trellis. A powder horn his great-grandfather taught him to make. A concrete toad inherited from his grandmother.
“Oh, this is cool,” he says, veering off course.
A few minutes later:
“Oh, I forgot to show you this.”
Then:
“You want to see something really cool?”
The tour never quite follows a straight line.
Neither does Fitch.
Long before Battle Hill Forge became known for custom gates, garden structures and sculpture found everywhere from private estates to major cultural institutions, Fitch was a child building armor for toy animals.
“I had a Black Panther that was this big and I armored it,” he says, holding his hands a few inches apart. “I made all my little people and creatures, and I armored them all up and I made all the weapons for them.”
Fitch’s father was a logger. Tools were plentiful. Toys were not.
“He wouldn’t buy us toys really, so we would have to make our own.”
The family business, if there was one, was making things.
Izzy FitchNatalia Zukerman
His great-grandfather was a master craftsman who made Windsor chairs in collaboration with his uncle, Bert Fitch. His father supplied the raw materials, Bert made the chairs, his great-grandfather carved the spindles. His relatives were renowned woodworkers. People would travel from far and wide to have his great grandfather make handles for them.
“I really learned a lot from spending time with my grandparents and my great-uncles,” he says.
Today, that inheritance is visible everywhere inside the forge.
Giant steel pumpkins wait beside elegant peony supports. Honeycomb sculptures support an endearing bee also made by Hackett. Giant orbs loom playfully. Metal mushrooms, used in classes Fitch teaches to children, line the windowsills.
Many are prototypes Some are commissions. Some exist simply because Fitch thought they might be fun to make.
“I just think of something cool,” he says. And then he makes it.
“Most of the metalworkers that I work with don’t want to talk to people,” he says. “They’re like, ‘Just tell us what you want. Give me the plans and I’ll make it.’”
Fitch is different. Part craftsman and part translator, he enjoys helping clients discover what they want before it exists.
Unless, of course, he’s distracted by a frog story.
The previous Battle Hill Forge location, in Millerton, included a small pond where Fitch often ate lunch.
“There was a dead mouse out there one time,” he recalls. “This frog was so clever. He would sit near the dead mouse and when flies came down, he would get a fly.”
He watched the frog for an entire lunch break.
The story arrived somewhere between explanations of Japanese patinas and custom railings.
It also explains a lot.Fitch notices everything: plants, insects, old tools, odd solutions, clever engineering tricks. His work is filled with observations gathered from gardens, forests, old European designs and conversations with other makers.
A peony support isn’t just a peony support. It’s an opportunity to improve something. A trellis isn’t just a trellis. Maybe it can come apart for shipping. Maybe it can help a plant grow differently. Maybe it can do something no one has considered before.
“I’m not really inventing anything new,” he says. “I just tweak it a little bit.”
After its beginning in Falls Village, moving to Millerton and eventually settling in Wassaic, Battle Hill Forge has become one of the region’s success stories. The shop is booked months in advance. Projects range from garden ornaments to monumental railings weighing hundreds of pounds. Designers seek him out. Gardeners collect his work.
Yet Fitch remains most animated when discussing collaboration.
The intern helping in the shop first met him as a student in one of his metalworking classes. Local glass artists add to his sculptures. Garden designers have helped refine his plant supports. For Burning Man this summer, he’s joining a team of fellow artists to build an installation featuring an oculus and a pair of metal sphinxes.
“We’ll have a little party,” he says.
The phrase could describe half the projects in the shop, especially the praying mantis. Technically, that sculpture belongs to Hackett.
“He makes all this cool stuff,” Fitch says. “I sell them for him because he’s one of those artists who doesn’t want to deal with the public.”
Fitch laughs.
“Which is totally smart.”
Outside, a dog wanders through the yard. A timber framer works next door. Metal rusts into beautiful shades of brown. New ideas wait in various stages of completion and there’s just a little magic around every corner.
To contact Battle Hill Forge, visit battlehillforge.com.
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