The Traprock Landscapes of New England. Peter M. LeTourneau
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Aptly named Fall Brook drops more than twenty-five feet over ledges of Hampden basalt at Westfield Falls on the northwestern flank of Mount Higby. The Connecticut Valley hosts an unusally high concentration of cascades and waterfalls created by the rugged traprock terrain. Miner Road, Middletown, Connecticut.
Ancient eastern red cedars, like this weather-beaten specimen, assume bonsai-like forms under harsh summit conditions. Some trees clinging to the cliffs are among the oldest in southern New England. West Peak, Meriden.
Car-size talus blocks form buttresses at the base of the massive cliffs of East Peak in Meriden.
Once embedded in the national identity and the emerging American landscape aesthetic, by the mid-twentieth century the traprock cliffs had largely become forgotten relics of an earlier age. Fortunately, in the 1970s and 1980s a rising interest in outdoor pursuits and increased environmental awareness led to a new appreciation of the unique ecological and recreational values of the traprock highlands. Today, more than fifty municipalities, dozens of nonprofit organizations, two states—Connecticut and Massachusetts—and the National Park Service are managing the parks, conservation easements, open-space parcels, and trails on the traprock ridges with renewed vigor.
Because the traprock highlands clearly meet the National Park Service criteria for “landscapes of national significance,” we hope that this book will serve as impetus for establishing a Connecticut Valley National Heritage Corridor following the example of the very successful Blackstone River Valley Heritage Corridor and National Park in nearby Rhode Island and eastern Massachusetts.
We are excited that you are joining us on our journey through the traprock hills of the Connecticut Valley, landscapes that the Amherst College geologist Edward Hitchcock so aptly described as “the grand and beautiful united.”
According to noted landscape historian John Brinckerhoff Jackson, the rich soils and mild climate of the Connecticut Valley offered the early English settlers their “first reassuring glimpse of the rich New World they had dreamt of, but had failed to find on the shores of Massachusetts Bay.” View of the Connecticut River from Mount Holyoke, looking north.
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Rising in Shapes of Endless Variety
GEOGRAPHY OF THE TRAPROCK HIGHLANDS
The whole of this magnificent picture, including in its vast extent, cultivated plains and rugged mountains, rivers, towns, and villages, is encircled by a distant outline of blue mountains, rising in shapes of endless variety.
Benjamin Silliman, Remarks Made on a Short Tour between Hartford and Quebec in the Autumn of 1819 (1820)
With its long and storied cultural history, interesting rocks and minerals, fascinating fossils, rich soils, and distinctive landforms, the Connecticut Valley is a region that holds special meaning for geographers, geologists, paleontologists, farmers, writers, artists, historians, landscape tourists, outdoor enthusiasts, and, surprisingly, even cigar aficionados. A locus for important cultural, scientific, technological, academic, agricultural, and economic developments in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the Connecticut Valley continues today as a vital center of technology, education, and finance.
For geographers, the Connecticut Valley is the elongate lowland in central Connecticut and Massachusetts. Comprising the most prominent physiographic feature in southern New England, the Connecticut Valley, with its chain of traprock hills, is clearly visible in satellite imagery. On the ground, the Connecticut Valley is recognized not only by its lowland topography, but also by its distinctive geology. The main part of the Connecticut Valley measures about 85 miles long from Northampton to New Haven and just over 20 miles from east to west at its widest point north of Hartford. The historic Deerfield Valley is a small northern extension of the main Connecticut Valley measuring about 5 miles wide and 15 miles in length from Greenfield to Amherst, Massachusetts.
The terms Connecticut Valley and Connecticut River Valley refer to separate, but partly overlapping, geographic features, a fact that has caused considerable consternation among geographers at least since the late 1800s, when Harvard’s William Morris Davis outlined the characteristics of the two distinct regions. Even more vexing for geographers is the fact that, although the Connecticut River appears comfortably ensconced in the Connecticut Valley lowland, it nonetheless makes an abrupt easterly exit at Middletown by cutting through more resistant Paleozoic-age metamorphic and igneous rocks of the Eastern Highlands on its way to Long Island Sound. Thus, the name Connecticut River Valley refers to the lowlands surrounding the largest river in New England, a watercourse that passes through the northern part of the Connecticut Valley on its 410-mile journey from the Connecticut Lakes in northern New Hampshire to Long Island Sound at Old Saybrook, Connecticut.
Viewed from Chauncey Peak, the Metacomet Mountains form a great wall from Mount Higby near Middletown (left), to Beseck Mountain, Middlefield (center), and Pistapaug Mountain, Durham (right). These formidable landforms exerted a strong influence on patterns of settlement and travel corridors. George Washington passed through the rugged gap between Pistapaug and Fowler Mountains when he traveled from Wallingford to Durham, Connecticut, first in 1775 to gather supplies for his soldiers, and again on his presidential tour of 1789. Historical monuments in East Wallingford and Durham, Connecticut mark the route.
For farmers and students of New England history, the Connecticut Valley is synonymous with rich soils possessing a favorable mixture of sand, silt, and clay, high organic content, and good water-holding capacity. From the Woodland Period through the early years of European contact, the alluvial terraces bordering the Connecticut River and its major tributaries supported substantial Native American villages with a nutritious triumvirate of corn, beans, and squash, supplemented by fish and game from adjacent waters and forests. The Dutch explorer and trader Adriaen Block was the first European to explore the Connecticut Valley by mapping the Red Hills (Rodenbergh) region near New Haven and sailing up what he called the Versche, or “Fresh,” River as far as the Enfield rapids in 1614. Attracted by the abundance of beaver, muskrat, and other furs, Dutch traders established Huys van Hoop (the House of Hope), a profitable but short-lived outpost at present-day Hartford, to process pelts arriving from the interior hinterlands. More interested in furs than farming, and facing the inevitable decline of an economy based on the reproductive rates of small mammals, as well as rapidly increasing numbers of English settlers who began arriving in the early 1630s, the Dutch began ceding their interest in the Connecticut Valley by the mid-1600s.
Lured to the Connecticut Valley by reports of arable lands bordering the Connecticut River and hopes of cutting into the Dutch fur trade, the English established the earliest permanent settlements in the region at Windsor (1633), Wethersfield (1634), Agawam (1635), Hartford (1635–37), and Springfield (1636), followed by Farmington (1640), Longmeadow (1644), Middletown (1651), Northampton (1653), and Deerfield (1673). According to the noted landscape historian John Brinckerhoff Jackson, the productive soils, ample precipitation, and long growing season of the Connecticut Valley provided the English with “the first reassuring glimpse of the rich New World they had dreamt of, but had failed to find on the shores of Massachusetts Bay.”1
Setting the benchmark for agricultural productivity in New England, the Connecticut River “intervales” were widely sown with wheat and rye in the early years. In his exhaustive history of New England farming, A Long Deep Furrow (1982), Howard Russell rightly called the Connecticut Valley “the continent’s first wheat belt … the … breadbasket of New England: first the area around Hartford, then the middle section” (that is, from Northampton to Springfield). Production of wheat on the Connecticut River intervales