An Interview with Bob Blair in 2003

The Chester Historical Society has been taping Chester residents for decades. We currently have over oral histories from more than 60 people. We are including Bob Blair’s oral history here because Bob was one of the founders of the Historical Society, as well as a Chester native and a Chester First Selectman. He died in March 2020 at age 97. His interview, we think, is very interesting and contains some interesting history of early Chester.

Interview with Robert Blair for the Chester Historical Society, June 11, 2003. This interview was taped at Bob Blair’s house on Straits Road, at its intersection with Straits Road.

RB:    My name is Robert James Blair.  My birth date is May 12th, 1922, which makes me 81 years old, and I was born one house from where I’m living now, so you might call me a Chester native. My father and mother moved here from Scotland and settled into Chester after a couple of other small towns. The house I was born in was just one house down here.  But my father and mother had five children, and the house was very small.  So in about 1922, I was only six months old, they bought a house through what they called the Chester Building and Loan.  The banks didn’t loan money in those days.  But there was an organization of men, businessmen, that wanted to help people and earn a little money, and they were very fair.  Many people in Chester, who worked in the factories as my father did, were able to get their own home through the Chester Building and Loan Association.  And I can tell you that my father paid eighteen dollars a month.  The house cost 1800 dollars.  It had no electricity, no running water, outdoor plumbing, but my father brought up the five kids, and burned wood [laughs].

Q:      They were from Scotland, what made them choose Chester? 

RB:   My father worked for Senator Harwood at a farm out here, and he had a caretaker’s house, too.  I think that’s what brought him into this area.  He worked there on the farm as a—whatever they did on the farm.  Benjamin Harwood, that’s where Aaron Manor is now, the convalescent home.  He owned that.  It’s a big piece of land, and my father worked for him, and that’s how he got started in Chester. Even later on in years, he went back to—he was also a gardener, a professional kind of gardener, you know.  He learned in the old country.  So he went back to that in some estates over in Old Lyme and different places.

Q:      Did he also work in a factory at some time?

RB:   My father worked for about twenty years in Bates’s factory, as most every man did, and they were glad to do it, because they didn’t drive cars, very many of them, so he was able to ride his bicycle, which he had, every day.  I can remember him, when I went to school, I would be out playing, and he’d be going by on his bike and he would holler over, and the kids always kidded me, “Bobby, did you water and feed the chickens?” [Laughs]  You know, they’d call me Bobby.  The kids would all laugh, you know, ‘cause he wanted to make sure I did take care of the chickens [laughs].

Q:      So you kept a few animals?

RB:   Yeah, mostly just chickens and ducks, and things like that, and then of course everybody had big gardens, and canning, and the whole deal there.  It’s interesting, the whole homestead is still in my family’s name, my daughter is living there now.

Q:      Okay.  And the old homestead is?

RB:   On Pleasant Street.  That’s where my father bought it in 1922, and when I first got married, there was a woodshed hooked to the house, what we called the summer kitchen in those days, where my mother did the canning.  It was just like a big shed.  But in order to get started in married life, I converted it to an apartment.  So I stayed there, and I added on to it, and we didn’t have any mortgage of course.  It was kind of nice.  My mother had passed away when I was thirteen.  Twelve or thirteen.  I had four sisters, which was helpful, and my father.  My father at that point decided to go back into the field of caretaking over in other parts, and the girls took care of the house.  So, I just wanted to point out that I built the apartment, lived there about twelve or thirteen years, and then we had two children, and—

I got this house because I worked in real estate.  I had sold a house to a young couple, and at the closing, they decided they didn’t want it, and the owners were from New York at that point.  I was a real estate agent with no money, so they were very disappointed, of course, and I felt bad, too.  And there was I think about a five hundred dollar commission involved.  I said, “Well, you keep the five hundred dollar commission, I’ll assume the GI loan.”  It was a veteran’s loan, I was a veteran.  And I walked out of that room with a house, with no money down. [Laughs] That was this house, right here.  So that’s how I got this house.

Imagine that?  My wife was furious.  She said, “You bought a house without me knowing it.” So anyway, I’m back almost where I started [laughs]. But this is an excellent location up here.

Q:      Were there any other relatives that came over from Scotland, or just your mother and father?

RB:   Not very many.  I had an uncle who settled over in Chicago, and he worked for the Northern Pacific Railroad, I believe.  But we didn’t have very close contact with any of our relatives, ‘cause we were first generation, too, you have to remember.  I did have an aunt who lived with us for a while.  A single lady, she was, and she passed away in Chester.  But that was the only contact I had.  But my sisters went back to Scotland and visited with the relatives, which was nice. 

Q:      Did your folks come through Ellis Island?

RB:   Yeah, we looked up their name. They came through there.  My father met my mother on the boat.  My father was kind of an entertainer too.  He was Scotch, and he would sing the Scotch songs, and he would wear those kilts and things, and he was an entertainer, and he had a good sense of humor.  So he met my mother, and they got married after a short while, I think, up in Massachusetts somewhere.  It’s interesting, how things happen.  My parents’ first child was a boy, who died at six months. At that time, it was hard to get kids up to even a year old, they had a lot of diseases.  You know what I mean?  Terrible.  You go up to the cemetery, you look.  Awfully hard.  But then they had the four girls and myself. I have just one sister now, Margaret Breslin, who lives in Chester. She and her husband Bill used to own the package store downtown for many, many years.  They lived over on East Liberty Street.  I don’t remember when Bill died.

But that’s a little bit about my background.  I went through the Chester High School here and graduated in 1940.  And I had the wanderlust and was going to get out to Alaska with a friend of mine, but we got a little homesick halfway out, and turned around and came back.  I did, anyway.  And I’m not ashamed to admit it. [Laughs]

But we didn’t come home.  We didn’t stop in Chester, we went through.  We didn’t want to—because everybody thought we were on our way to Alaska—so we ended up in Maine, working on a farm up there.  We stayed all summer, and he went to California and I came back to Chester.  And he’s still out that way somewhere. 

Q:      When you were growing up, would you ever travel out of Chester, whether to Hartford, or New Haven, or—

RB:   Oh, the hub in those days was Middletown. The bus service w through Chester center on the hour, and that helped a lot because your mother would take you up and get you clothes and different things, always to Middletown, In those days they had Kresge’s Store, which is the original K-Mart, right?

Middletown had a lot of beautiful stores on Main Street.  So we had good transportation, back and forth from Saybrook to Middletown, then you had to transfer to Hartford if you wanted to.  But we didn’t go very far from here.  We hardly ever went to Saybrook even.  You were pretty well confined, because you had everything you needed, except for maybe some clothing.  But we had a good clothing store in Chester, Mr. Feinstein.  He was there for many years, where the lamp shop is [corner of North Main and Main].  He lived upstairs and brought up three boys, and put them all through college, from that little store.  One was a dentist, one was an artist, and one was a lawyer.  And, one little store.  In those days, if you didn’t have the money, you put it on the books.  You know what I mean?  You’d pay him when you could.  Everybody liked him.  I went to school with his son Malcolm. I would say that Malcolm ran that store from about 1925 up through 1940 or something, and then sold it out.

Q:      What were some of the other stores downtown at that time?

RB:   There were a lot of grocery stores, A&P, First National, IGA and Zanardi’s. Zanardi’s had meat.  And then there was a couple of small stores. Abraham Birnbaum had a meat market.  A lot of them did home deliveries, too.  You know, you just call in your order or he’d pick up your order when he came with a little truck.  One thing was odd, because Zanardi also sold kerosene, and he carried the kerosene along with the groceries and everything. [Laughs] And everything would always smell of kerosene.

You know, they did those things in those days.  Imagine that.  You were pretty well taken care of.  And, you know, talk about premiums, back in the early days, the First National, or Finast, I can remember my father getting a clock, and every time you bought your weeks’ groceries they’d punch a thing, and eventually you didn’t have to pay for the clock, you know.  Sessions clock, I remember, up on the mantel there.  So they gave away things.  During the Depression, 1932, there’s a little red building over here, just over the bridge—

 The government set up a little area where the people that needed help could get flour, rice, Dinty Moore’s stew, and many of the people had to avail themselves.  Some of them didn’t have a car so they’d use a wheelbarrow.  I can remember this, to get flour.  Mostly flour they wanted.  And the government did help them to do that.  They didn’t want welfare, the people didn’t, but they had to—there just was not work.  It was awfully hard.  But people were pretty self-sufficient in the smaller towns, it wasn’t so hard.  Because they burned wood, and they had gardens, and they had good neighbors to help them.  This was what kept them going.  But it was a tough time. 

Q:      That’s what I’ve heard.  I was going to ask you if Chester fared a little better than some other cities in that time. 

RB:   I’d say we fared better, I would.  Because we didn’t have great expenses, taxes were practically zero, you know.  They kept taxes very, very low.  They didn’t pay the teachers very much, either, in those days.  Terrible, terribly low pay.  But to give you an idea, I can remember working in the factory.  If my father brought home—let’s see, he worked forty hours.  He probably got between thirty-five and fifty cents an hour, you know, to give you an idea.  We have to remember, there was no medical insurance, no vacations, no sick time.  Either you worked, you get paid, or you don’t get paid.  So many of the men and women went to work, they didn’t feel too good, but they always went to work.  And most of them walked or had a bike.  Some of the factories set up little sheds where they could keep the horses there, too.  And the people—they’d come with wagons or something, they did that.

Q:      At the time, were there many cars in Chester?

RB:   No.  Actually, the State of Connecticut set up T-A-R-F, Town Aid Road Fund, back in 1932 or ’33, and that was to get the dirt roads hard-topped. 

Our road, Pleasant Street up there, was probably done around 1935 or ’36, because we used to—I remember sliding, and if it was hard-topped, they wouldn’t have been able to slide because the snow would have burned off.  But the state gave all the towns money to do that, because roads were terrible, you know, gravel, and every year you had to work the roads.  I can remember also, there was a sidewalk coming down Pleasant Street. I can remember the man that plowed it was Carl Watrous, and he had a wooden plow.

Q:      The roads were paved a lot earlier than I would have expected.  I’m surprised.

RB:   You think that was early? Actually, the federal government started a lot earlier than that, building the Lincoln Highway.  The Lincoln Highway was  the first one they did. They didn’t have much for equipment in those days.  You have to remember that was when the cars were just coming, Model A’s, Model T’s.  The roads were mud, and they couldn’t get through.

Q:      I never heard of the Lincoln Highway, where was that?

RB:   You know, I don’t know where it is.  I was just watching it on television. I don’t think it had anything to do with Lincoln, Nebraska, but what they were trying to do was get the highway to go from the east coast to the west coast.  They did finally, you know, but it was terribly hard going.  See, the automobile industry, Henry Ford, was the one that pushed for the highways, ‘cause he was selling cars, right?  He had to do it, otherwise he couldn’t have done it.

Q:      Well, that’s not that much different than what Jonathan Warner did, building the road down to the ferry.  That was sort of self-serving, but, you know, the road’s still there.

RB:   That’s right, and the ferry’s still there. [Laughs] So we can give Henry Ford some credit for this, that he had the foresight to push.  And he said you can’t expect private enterprise to do it, it’s up to the federal government, and he was right, because it was too much of a burden on the towns to do it.  But, here’s a point.  You wonder how the towns were able to build the roads.  We didn’t have contractors, right?  The towns were the contractors that built their own roads.  We have to remember that.  And they laid them out, they did a beautiful job.  They paid penalties, money, to the property owners to take their land, surveyed it out.  A lot of good surveyors, and it’s all documented still, a lot of them.           

But they were the builders.  Without the towns, there would be no roads.  How they did it, you wonder.  No chainsaws, nothing.  That’s where the town road crews came in, I believe.  They used the word crew for some reason, or gang.  Always town road crew.  You could always get a job in the town, if you were down and out, working on the roads.  Remember that, in the early days, you always could earn a few dollars.  The town felt that they had an obligation to give a little work. 

They also, even back in the late 1800s, always took care of the widows.  They’d bring her coal, or fix her windows, or— You have to remember, a widow had no income.  No Social Security, nothing, if their husband passed away.  But the towns really helped a lot.  If you read the early town reports, which we have all the way back, it shows even the names of the people and what they got, because it was the town money that they were spending.  That was the annual town report. 

Q:      That’s a good lesson. 

RB:   So, we were talking about the center before, what other stores.  They had enough stores so that you didn’t have to go out much.  They had a good hardware store for years and years in Chester.  And they supported it.  And we had two drugstores—well, one drugstore, and one other that sold similar stuff.  Robbie’s and Shirley Miceli’s.  Other than that, you had your barber shops and your tavern. [Laughs] The Pattaconk was always there.

Q:      That was always a tavern?

RB:   Yes, always. It was a tavern when I was a very young kid, so it goes way, way back as a tavern.  Chester center—you know, I think the road originally coming down from what we used to call Battle Street, but now Maple Street—if you were coming down to the center where the Town Office is, that was a vacant lot, and I believe the road went right across there originally.  It didn’t go around through the center.  The road came from Deep River, down by the hardware store {intersection of Maple & Main], ‘cause that’s all been filled in now.  It forded the brook right in back of the Town Office, went across to what is now the New Haven Savings Bank, which was vacant, went by a house owned by the Larsons, in back of the Archambaults, and then connected with Goose Hill up just below the Goodspeed theater.  I believe that’s where the road went.

Q:  That was back in your childhood?

RB:   No, it would be way back. And, the reason I believe that—when we were dredging the creek there, we found the wharf.  Actually, they drove down for a wharf, they got across that stretch there.  So they must have been bringing boats and things up into that area there, and unloading them, and then going up, you know, wherever they went to.  But I believe that’s where the road went.

Q:      That’s interesting.  Now, you mentioned dredging the creek.  Why would you dredge the creek?

RB:   We cleaned the creek out because all the store owners and everybody threw everything into the water over the hundred years.  Everything, boxes, bottles, stoves—there weren’t laws at that time.  So we took a backhoe, and we cleaned the brook out. Tommy Perry and I kind of spearheaded that one.  We didn’t ask anybody, we just did it.  Cleaned it out, because it was a terrible mess.  And we deepened it down, it was good, though.  Then we had a nice flow of water.  That was just before they put the sewers in, that time. It was good that we did because all the toilets were flushing everything right into the brook there, you know.  It was not a good situation, but they had been doing it for a hundred years, remember [laughs].

 We had the movie theater in the center, the Princess Theater, which was owned by the people that owned this house, the Leet brothers.  Leet brothers built that as a feed store on the bottom, and a movie theater on the top.

Q:      Is this the Stone Building at 4 Water Street?

RB:   The Stone Building.  I can remember my sisters going there to see the movies.  I can’t remember going there myself, but in the flood of 1938, that building showed with the name Princess Theater on it.  I’ve seen the photographs.  It was the name of the show, too, it showed right there. So that building is beautiful stone work, isn’t it? 

Chester had a lot of nice cobblestone, because they came from, I believe, the gravel bank in back of Bates’s [Goodspeed theater].  It was all gravel along the brook there, and you’ll see different places in Chester where they used those round, cobble, I call them.  Cobblestones.  These came from the glacier, that rolling, that polished them, and they got round. 

Q:      And they’re from behind the Bates factory?

RB:   Yup, and right up through to High Street.  And in back of High Street.  That whole area was gravel.  The other thing is, the glacier, when it came down through Chester, it actually came down through the valley coming all the way from Deep Hollow, right down through to Chester center.  That’s one leg of it.  The other leg is right here, this is all gravel, too.  Where the glacier was, you’ll find gravel, normally, ‘cause that brought it down.  And, in fact, if you dig out here you’ll find what I call beach stones. 

Q:      Were there any quarries operating?

RB:   The quarries had stopped.  But there were some good quarries, very good.  They used the stone. Deep River had better stones, though.  They did, they had beautiful stones.  Each town had their different colors, you know, the granite and everything.  But Chester had, back of the Old Town Hall [Meeting House], up on that side hill there, as you go up Goose Hill, that was all quarried.  You know where I mean, on the right-hand side.  All quarried there. And another big quarry was up Railroad Avenue.  That was a big quarry, on the right-hand side, and another one on Bokum Road.  Those were quarries.  And another one out on Cedar Lake Road.      Yeah, there was a smaller one out there, because I have that documented, too, because of Bushnell’s, people that moved up from Saybrook that built a house there back in 1830 or so,  it mentions in the deed the quarry in the back there on Cedar Lake Road.  

So that’s a little bit about the center.  And of course, the trolley came into the center up until about 1918, ended right in the center. The company lost financially because they had a wreck down around Branford. That killed it. But that was quite an undertaking, to bring that right into Chester center.

Q:      Absolutely.  So the tracks ran into the center of town and stopped?

RB:   It did, right at the cobblestone “Chester” wall.  There again is your cobble.  I believe that was put in there at the same time. It took a long time to get the right-of-way through, all the way up from Centerbrook it came, right through the woods it came. 

Q:      That is hard work. 

RB:   You know, when we dug for the sewer, we found a lot of gas lines.  You know, they manufactured, they had gas houses.  There’s one on what we call Sawmill Hill, between Chester and Deep River.  There’s another just outside of Deep River.  These houses were built to manufacture gas. For lighting. They piped it around to the towns. I guess some of the houses may have had it, I’m not sure of that.

Q:      Like street lights?

RB:   They probably used gas. You know, they probably used some sort of carbide or something to—they manufactured it.  I bet you Deep River Historical Society would know more about that, because both gas houses were in Deep River, I believe.  

I don’t know what year that Chester was electrified. I know that we didn’t get electricity ‘til 1932 in our house on Pleasant Street.  The power went by the house, but my father didn’t have it.  So I would say that Chester didn’t have a lot of electricity, probably before 1920, ’25.  I think the houses burned kerosene, lamps, you know, that’s what they were burning in the twenties.

Q:      Or oil, I suppose.

RB:   Yes, yes. But they did have gas.  Another interesting thing is some of the farms, in fact the Sypher farm in the west end.  I’m going to tell you this.  I was a good friend of Frank Sypher, he ran a farm out there, and his brother-in-law lived right across the street. Their name was Lynde, and they still own about two hundred acres. [Route 153]  I can remember going with my mother and father to a husking bee at Frank Sypher’s house when I was probably eight years old.  In those days it was the Grange that did it.  An actual husking bee, where they’re in the barn with the corn.  Imagine that?  I can remember that, and I can also remember Frank telling me that they made their own gas out of cow manure.  Using carbide, a drip—some sort of a drip system.  He showed me.  He’s gone, long gone now.  I wish we had him around.  But I can understand what he’s talking about, because—would that be methane gas?

Q:      Good stuff. Also deadly.

RB:   He had plenty of cow manure, you know.

Q:      There’ve been a number of people over the years that have died from jumping in manure pits, and grass clipping pits. Methane gas will knock you down and kill you fast.  It’s very explosive, too, and it’s also a greenhouse gas.  But, yeah, methane’s good stuff.  Landfill gas is methane.

RB:   Okay, so they probably had a drip system that went into a pile of some manure, and the gas—

Q:      Made it more activated—

RB:   Activated it, and then somebody used it.

Q:      Yup, good stuff.

RB:   I’ll be darned.  I’ll be darned.

Q:      Maybe that’s how the gas houses operated.

RB:   You know, I wish we could learn more about those gas houses. 

I also pretty much remember the ice houses in Chester.  In fact, there was one just to the foot down here.  That one was still standing, maybe 25, 35 years ago.  And that was owned by the Leet brothers, because they had cows, you know.  They sold meat too. I’m trying to think when I used to skate there.  Maybe closer to 50 years, 40 to 50 years.  There was one there, over on the mill pond.  They had a lot of ice men.  My wife’s father was an ice man.  For years, in Ivoryton, another town.  So she knows the ice business. 

Q:      The ice house, it must have been where the pull-off is now?

RB:   Yes. Where you go skating, in there.  There’s a little piece of land.  The town owns that.  The town acquired all that through the Stanley Works, when they—I was involved in that.  We got the chain of lakes and brooks and dams, and the whole works, up through.  But there were two ice houses.  The biggest one was out in the west end, out at Cockaponset—Pattaconk Lake.  That was a big ice house, big one with big chutes that they pushed the ice, kept pushing it up, the sawdust there. They stored a lot of ice out there. You have to remember, we didn’t get refrigeration until we had electricity, so everybody had their ice man.  And it worked out.

So Chester had a nice place to get ice, out on the ponds, and some of the farmers probably had their own ponds and cut their own ice, too.  It was a normal thing to do in the winter, and I think ice was a lot thicker in those days.  The weather was a lot colder, no question about it. 

 I remember also Mr. Polinski’s sawmill, which is the Abbott Company that was just sold out here.  The Polinskis were very good friends of our family, and I can remember him selling wood. He didn’t have much power with his saw.  You know why?  It didn’t have any drop, with the water.  He was getting on the tail end here, pretty flat.  The pond in back of him was—I can remember hearing those saws, this big saw.  He’d be trying to ease the saw into the big logs, and the water part was so weak that it would just about get through. [Laughs]

Q:      Did some of these mills have to shut down part of the summer because of water power?

RB:   Yes. They shut down, and they cleaned their sluiceways and had the men do maintenance work.  You bet your life they had to close, the water was too low.  And that water was used over and over again, too, wasn’t it?

Q:      Yup, north and south branch, whatever you call the two streams. It sounds like there were a lot of mills running when you were growing up in Chester.

RB:   I’ll tell you how many there were, just on this branch, coming up from the center.  It was Jennings to start with.  Then Middlesex Handle was right here.  That was Turner and Day, the ones that made Louisville Slugger baseball bats up here for a while. They finished them—they were shipped up from Kentucky, or somewhere, and the men finished them right here.  I remember going there, buying axe handles myself.  My father would send me there.  Yes, right here.  There was also a ship’s anchor store right here.  They made ship’s anchors. In a different building, before the Middlesex Handle Company came in there. That was Snow, Abel Snow, I think his name was.  And then they went out, and of course, the next one would be Polinski, the big saw mill there, which was pretty flat, and then you went to the witch hazel people, which was right on the sharp corner as you go past Louie Hanson’s gas station, on the left-hand side. There was a witch hazel distillery there. There was a dam there.  That’s where the Pond’s Extract Company got started.  Right there. Pond’s—Chesebrough Ponds. My father, my sister can remember that after they closed it, they made an apartment or something over the factory, and our family, not me, but them, lived there for a while when they were young kids. So that was another one there.  It burned down terribly.  It was a terrible fire.  I thought they made witch hazel, but they made something to do with Pond’s, and it was at that point that they moved to another town.  

It’s pretty flat from then on until you get out to—past the next one would be Perry’s.  I’m trying to give you some pinpoints.  Before you start going up that other hill, on the left-hand side there’s a little pond.  The whole area from that point on was extremely active with mills.  Maybe six to ten mills in that little area.  From that area up to just before Cedar Lake, extremely busy place.  It was called Pondville.  Because it was a separate little area of Chester, Pondville.  Post Office there, too, Cedarville.  Cedarville Post Office was right there where I’m talking, where that—next, Perry’s shop.  And Ferguson’s, and then the stone factory, and then the saw mills, all clustered in—in fact, you know where the wooden bridge is–Wig Hill Bridge? 

That whole area was extremely busy, the west end.  A lot of activity, a lot of water, you know, good drop off there.  And they had shoddy mills there, too.  Shoddy made cloth.  They also had the first tenement houses for Chester, right in that area.  They built them for the Irish weavers or the Irish clothmakers.  They had a long house.  They called it the Long House. That burned, too.  But interestingly, the next house up on the left has one of the chimney caps still on it, from that—it used to be called Tilley’s Rest. It’s on the left-hand side, and you can see one of those caps that came from the Long House. If you go by, it’s got kind of like a wing on it. 

That area probably closed back in the early 1900s.  The saw mill probably didn’t close until 1925, 1930.  It was in the same ownership for maybe a hundred years, the saw mill there.  But, very interesting area, especially with the Post Office, for a short period of time.  Unfortunately, we lost one of the good historians who lived right there, a man named Jesse Lanzi, who collected a lot of the articles that were made there.  He knew so much about all that area.

It’s fascinating, really.  At one point, on the stream, on the dam, what they did in order to get a drop, way down, they actually dug another canal alongside, higher.  They went up on the side hill and raised the water in the pond to get the water to run through the canal, maybe two hundred feet, and then used the tube to shoot the water down into what they call a pit wheel.  Instead of a water wheel, this was a pit wheel, so that the force of that water is turning it in the pit.

Q:      You know where you can still see what’s left of it, over at the old Brooks mill on Liberty. You go down a little farther, and where the stream comes under the road, you go a little farther up, and there’s evidence of a sluiceway that looked like it came from the pond and went across the road, and came down.  There’s a tube down there, but I never figured it out.  It’s clicking now that you’re mentioning it to me.

RB:   They were using a pit wheel there.  That area you’re talking about’s very interesting.  Look how far they brought that water along that side hill.

Q:      Oh yeah, it was probably five hundred feet, at least.  And that pond.  It was a long way.

RB:   Everett Brooks recently died, one of the Brooks boys, whose father and grandfather ran the factory.  He told me he remembered digging, helping to dig that canal when he was a kid.  He was working for his father.  Because it was all hand dug, and they had a guillotine type of mechanism in the sluiceway for that pond into that canal there, so they could raise and lower those boards.  I remember that, raising them up, and that would either let the water into the tube or let it out over the dam.

Q:      That’s interesting.  It must have gone right through where there’s a house on the corner of Liberty and Deep Hollow Road. Or maybe it went right along the road there.

RB:   The canal? Actually, you can walk along the canal.  We have scenic easements.  But that other building, there’s an old mill building right where you’re talking, on the right-hand side of Deep Hollow Road.  That was a very early grist mill.  They got their water power through another sluiceway, not the same one, to run another big water wheel in there.  They had their own, to run the mill wheels, or whatever they did in there.  Then, you go up further, to Deuse’s factory, they owned the [Deep Hollow] road even, in the early days, up through that Deep Hollow, and that was a very successful enterprise.  Not too many factories on that branch.

You can still see where there was a stone tunnel, just below the Goodspeed theater parking lot, where it comes across, there’s a fairly new concrete bridge there.  Somehow, in the early days, there was a stone tunnel.  You can see where it’s been stoned up now with blocks.  But that was the tunnel, came out at Water Street to the iron foundry.  There was a big iron foundry right in the center. You know, where they made well sweeps, and the pulleys that pulled water up out of the well, I have one, made in Chester.  Plus, as everybody has in Chester, they have the iron thing, Made in Chester, on the fireplace.  That water was brought down through a canal.  It came out a little further—further than the New Haven Savings Bank, it would have.  Because the brook, now, at the Bank, it’s just on the other side.  So it’d be on the other side of the brook there. 

So they were bringing the water down for some reason, to run that—it was a pretty big foundry in there, near where the herb shop is now.  And that house that sets back there, in back of the Bank, that was definitely an inn.  That’s what makes me think, again, that that road came across there.  Because of that inn there, too.  That’s been documented, that particular building there. 

It’s interesting to plot how the road from Chester center got out to Cedar Lake.  It certainly had a different route than the present one.  This was it, right here, right across in front of my house, this was the road.  I’ll tell you why they did that.  It started at Chester center.  Remember the brook is over more to the north here, right?  So the road followed it up through, came right by my house here.  Here again it’s on this side of the brook, stayed on this side of the brook until it hit a tollhouse just beyond Louie Hanson’s gas station there.  It didn’t go where the gas station is.  There’s a house up on the hill.  It went up the hill there, somehow, and then down.  The only way I can figure is it stayed to the left of that sharp curve.  There was a tollhouse down on the left-hand side.  That I know for sure.  The road stayed mostly on the left-hand side of the stream wherever possible, so it didn’t have to cross, build any bridges.  You look. 

Think of the road.  Baker Road was the old road, too.  Now, there’s also a question, when Baker Road got out as far as Route 148, when it converges there, I don’t think it turned left and went to Cedar Lake, I think it went right across the wooden bridges there and connected with Wig Hill.  Wig Hill coming down, ‘cause Wig Hill went right straight across, and came out at the colonial house, a big yellow house that’s in the Chester books as being a stagecoach stop.

I think that’s what happened.  That road—that this road converged, and when it crossed the wooden bridge, connected with that one, and then went towards Cedar Lake.  So roads were an important thing, and we still have some of the old roads, unimproved roads left.  A few.  Cedar Swamp Road, part of Hoop Hole Hill, part of Wig Hill, Turkey Hill. 

 This road was called Owl Road, originally—Straits Road, Owl Road.  It’s funny, if you look at the names, isn’t it, how they changed.

 So let’s see, we followed that.  I guess you could always get a job in Chester because, a lot of factories, right?

Q:      Yeah.  During your time, they pretty much graduated from water power, they must have used steam, because they were between water and electricity.

RB:   Although Deuse’s—Reg Deuse was a good friend of mine.  He always used water whenever he could.  And Brooks’s did, too.  They wanted to save, you know, they didn’t want to spend any money.  They did eventually put in big electric motors and converted over. And also, Roger Gladding.  The brush shop out here, it’s a restaurant now [Brush Mill].  He always used water power.  He also used the water power to do something up at his house.  He made electricity and sent it back up to his house, and he had all kinds of graphs and things, he could tell how much it was generating.  He was a master, that guy.  He was some guy.  If you knew Roger, you knew he was so smart.  He knew everything. He was a graduate of Worcester Polytech.  His classmate was Werner von Braun. So this guy was a wiz [laughs].

It’s interesting that Roger’s Brush Works—actually their mail address was Deep River, because the rural mail man came back this route, so they had to use Deep River, not Chester. It was a small shop, but it made work for a lot of women out there, because the women put the brushes together and things.  And everybody needed brushes, for cleaning milk bottles, for the carpet sweepers.  I believe they made a carpet sweeper, too.  The brushes, at least. A lot of products were made in Chester.  Bed springs, even.

Q:      Did any of the factories convert or start making some different things during World War II for the war effort?

RB:   Yes, they did change over, a lot of them.  They did, yup, they did.  They had to.  I’m trying to think back to anything else that might be of interest. 

There were also so many other businesses that—like making handmade bluefish hooks.  A man named Mr. Crook, in fact on Pleasant Street, he had a little shop, and he had a one-cylinder engine that went chuck-chuck, you know, one of those one-lungers?  I was a kid and I used to go over and watch him, and he probably sent me home many a time.  But he used native cedar, cut it and turned his own shank on a lathe, and bent the hook.  These were bluefish hooks.  He had men, fairly wealthy people coming from all over, and he would ship these.  You know, he made them one at a time, and he made a living at that.  He finally died, and they sold the business, and they tried to duplicate it down the center.  And it didn’t work out no more.  But that was just thing.  There were so many people that started small businesses, and I guess that happens in all towns, right?

Q:      What is it that you like about Chester?  I mean, you’ve been here all your life. 

RB:   I like it ‘cause it was a fairly slow town.  You know, it didn’t seem to be going anywhere. [Laughs] Yeah, and it even bothers me now that so many cars go by. [Laughs] Everybody is in a hurry to go. You know, people say, well, don’t you like to go away on vacation?  I say, “Well, I used to when I had the kids, when they were young.”  But I pretty much have what I want right here.  It’s a small country town, and you can go out in your pajamas and get your paper in the morning, and nobody thinks no different of you, right?

Q:      Tell me about your hobbies when you were growing up.  Obviously, you played guitar.  I’m fascinated how you got started with that.

RB:   I used to listen to the radio to Wheeling, West Virginia.  This was a country thing.  And of course, we didn’t have very strong radios, either, in those days.  I kind of liked the sound of the guitar.  I didn’t have any money.  My sister worked in Hartford, and finally she bought me a guitar when I was twelve or thirteen years old, and I used to drive them crazy, you know, with one chord.  Trying to learn one chord, I remember, and your fingers would hurt.  I kept it up, and before the war, I was playing with a lady with a piano, and her brother with a violin, and myself, and I didn’t even know where, like, B-flat, I didn’t know. I only knew C, G or D.  And they were playing songs—[Laughs] I got by.  We were playing down in Clinton in some hotel or something, I was about sixteen or seventeen years old.  But during the war, I learned a lot more.  I brought my guitar with me, during the war.  I took some lessons when I got out of the service, a few.  I had a good friend who was a great guitarist.  A boy from New York.  I still see him a lot, and I used to play with him a lot, too, just at his home.  He taught me a great deal.  But experience helps, you know, playing in a band.  And that extra ten dollars a week was my pocket money for many years.  Every New Years I’d be out playing, and my wife would be home with the children.  That didn’t help, but you did it.  I enjoy playing.  I enjoy seeing people.  The guitar, when I started, was not a very popular instrument, you know.  It had had its time during the twenties, and then the bass took over.  But the guitar used to be the instrument that held things together.  It was a rhythm instrument, not so much lead, like now.  I liked Chet Atkins, the way he played, so I studied some of his stuff so I could play finger-style of playing.  I had a beautiful 1954 Gibson L5 that I sold down in Nashville.

Q:      Boy, wouldn’t you like to have that now?

RB:   I’m glad it’s gone.  I’ll tell you why.  I played it for many a year.  It was a big, big heavy original, three pick-ups, oh, big heavy thing. I didn’t really like it that much.  I didn’t like to have to depend upon electricity to make my sound, you know [laughs].  But over the years I played both.  I’m not a great lead guitar player.  I am a rhythm player, that’s what I do.  I hold people together, when there’s singing or another instrument.  That’s what I like to do.  Or, I like to play, for my enjoyment, finger-style guitar playing, acoustic.  I have a good ear, and I have good rhythm, and those two things you can do a lot with. 

Q:      I’m curious what you did for enjoyment when you were growing up.

RB:   Like everybody else I belonged to the Boy Scouts, and in school, you know, I played sports, I was a long distance runner, and shot put, and basketball.  Those were the ones that I played mostly.  Not a star, but I enjoyed playing them.  Pretty good in the shot put, I was.  I was strong, you know, pretty good size. And then, let’s see, in school, did I belong to anything there?  Oh, I was president of the class, at school, too.  One year, yup.

Q:  This was Chester High School?

RB:   Yes.  And then, in later years, I was treasurer of the United Church, and I also was a fifty-year member of the Masonic Lodge in Chester, Silver Lodge.  I belonged to Rotary Club, for quite a while.  Those are a few of the things.  My hobbies were always outdoors.  I loved gardening, and I liked woodworking, those two things, finishing furniture, doing things as an old house requires, constantly [laughs]. You got to have a passion for fixing them up.  You enjoy it, or you make yourself nuts, and you make yourself miserable over it. 

But I like the location here.  It’s a beautiful place, you know, on the corner, and two ponds.  You can’t beat it.  And plenty of privacy here.   

Oh, we found plenty to do when we were kids.  The local ponds attracted us to swimming all summer, and we spent most of our time at Chester Mill Pond.  We were lucky we didn’t live too far.  My mother always trusted my sisters to watch the youngest, which was me, to make sure that I got back.  And she’d always make us wait one hour after we ate, too.  No cramps.  And we had skating—and a lot of good sledding in those days. I miss seeing children playing.  I don’t see many of them outdoors playing anymore.  We always played, like after supper we’d go out, and play until it was dark, and then come in.  We didn’t want to stay in the house and watch television.  Too many kids now are just stuck at computers and television at night, and they don’t get out.  And they don’t seem to socialize as much, even down at Chester center.  It was a nuisance, they said, the kids would hang around the center, and it was kind of nice to see them, you know.  They didn’t really bother anybody, and Chester center, some of them even as they got older would sit in the car, just sit there, you know, not bother anybody, and watch the world go by.  I miss that.  It’s that change.  Of course, the other change is the fraternal organizations have lost a lot of their emphasis because there’s so much competition for time now.  It used to be that you’d go out to the Grange on Monday night, your wife and you.  Chester had a nice Grange for many years.  Or, you’d go to the Masonic Lodge, or the Knights of Columbus, or something, or the Rotary.  Those organizations have lost some ground because of the competition. We used to have a lot more church suppers, too, and that would kind of bring the town together.  We have to remember, in those days, though, there was maybe only 1500 to 1000 people.  Now, you know, the town’s grown.  It’s big now.  And it’s going to grow a little bit more, too.  And we were just talking today—Chester is pretty well ideally situated with the highway to bring people on and off.  You know, it’s centralized pretty much, and the river on the east side.  And there’s good shopping in Saybrook and Middletown.  So, it’s a pretty convenient town to live in, right here.  That’s about all I’m going to tell you tonight, I guess.

Q:      That’s fabulous, I appreciate it.

RB:   You’re welcome.

End of Interview