Sharing Amesville’s industrial past

SALISBURY — On Sunday, Sept. 7, Lou Bucceri of the Salisbury Association Historical Society led a group of curious participants upstream from the dam on the Housatonic River into a heavily wooded area that was once the site of a sprawling industrial complex.

The trip to see what remains of the Horatio Ames iron works, and the Housatonic Rail Road’s industrial complex was part of the Housatonic Heritage series of walks in Connecticut and Massachusetts on weekends through Oct. 5.

Bucceri said that Ames was the son of a successful industrial family in eastern Massachusetts. The Ames shovel was ubiquitous in the early 19th century.

Young Ames turned out to be an indifferent salesman, Bucceri said. “He was an innovator, a tinkerer.”

So the Ames family, in conjunction with two other Massachusetts families with similar business interests and sons that needed jobs, bought property along the Housatonic River for Horatio to establish an iron works in 1832. By 1835 only Ames remained of the original three.

As the group made their way along the newly cleared trail, Bucceri pointed to a partially submerged tree in the river.

The tree marks the approximate spot of a second, smaller falls upstream from the Great Falls. Bucceri said the “Little Falls” was dynamited when the Hartford Electric Company built the dam in 1914 because the engineers feared the volume and force of the water would be too much for the new dam.

Off to west was a lagoon, completely covered in chartreuse-colored slime.

Bucceri said the lagoon is the site of where the Housatonic Railroad, which bought the site when Ames went out of business, had their roundtable for turning railroad cars and engines around.

As the group completed the short hike, Bucceri detailed how Ames had success at first with railroad locomotive wheels and innovations in iron production.

But the depression of 1857 was hard on American railroads, and in turn on Ames. Production fell 90%.

Ames tried to get into defense contracting when the Civil War began. After a couple of false starts and a strong suggestion of corruption in federal defense appropriations, Ames did finally land a contract to build 15 cannons that shot a 125-pound projectile six miles.

Ames was ready to deliver the guns in May of 1865.

Unfortunately for him, the war ended in April. Bucceri said the federal government lost no time backing out of the contract, and that was it for the Ames iron works.

The property was soon sold to the railroad, and then again to the electric company.

And Nature moved back in, doing an excellent job of reclaiming the site.

“This was an industrial area,” Bucceri said, gesturing around. “Can you tell?”