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RESHAPING THE LANDSCAPE

ROCKY RIVER HYDROELECTRIC STATION, NEW MILFORD

In the twentieth century, humans developed the ability to reshape their environment on an unprecedented scale. Road-building filled valleys and cut through mountains. Reclamation projects turned wetlands into dry ground. Irrigation transformed deserts into lush suburban lawns. Mighty rivers were dammed to create reservoirs to satisfy ever-increasing demands, particularly from growing cities, for water and electricity.

Around 1900, engineers found that electrical current could be transmitted for greater distances than had previously been considered feasible. Based on this discovery, businessman J. Henry Roraback consolidated a number of smaller electric companies into the Connecticut Light and Power Company (CL&P), which constructed a system of reservoirs and power plants to provide power to Connecticut cities.

The Housatonic River offered great potential for power generation, but seasonal fluctuations made it an unreliable resource. To address this problem, CL&P built the first major pumped-storage hydroelectric facility in the United States. Beginning in 1926, the company constructed a dam, 100 feet high and 952 feet long, across the Rocky River, a tributary of the Housatonic, to create Candlewood Lake. When the river is high, water is pumped up two hundred feet to the lake. When the river is low or demand is high, water is released from the lake and runs back down to turn turbines and generate power. Pumping water up actually uses more power than is produced on the return trip, but ensuring a reliable supply was worth it.

The powerhouse is a lofty brick structure, tall enough that the turbines can be lifted out of their housings for servicing. Full-length steel-sash windows emphasize the building’s height and provide natural light for monitoring the machinery within. Across the road the penstock, a giant tube fifteen feet in diameter, carries water up the hillside to the lake or allows it to flow back down to the power plant when needed. A seventy-six-foot vertical standpipe provides an escape in case of water surges.

Candlewood Lake flooded more than eight square miles in the towns of Danbury, Brookfield, New Fairfield, New Milford, and Sherman. It is eleven miles long and has more than sixty miles of shoreline. This was change on a massive scale. CL&P not only built an electric plant; it created a new landscape many miles long that has attracted development in the form of vacation cottages and year-round homes.

The lake also attracted a different mix of plants and animals and fish and birds, forming an ecosystem that in the following decades achieved its own stability. Yet the existence of this ecosystem depends on the human-made facility. For as solid as the dam seems to be, it also is fragile. Without ongoing human intervention in the form of maintenance, the water behind the dam, always seeking to run downhill, eventually will break through or flow around it. It will flood the towns downstream, leave lakefront property high and dry, and wipe out the Candlewood ecosystem. It is a useful reminder that whatever people build, they build in opposition to the laws of nature. In the end nature will win out.

THE PLACE

ROCKY RIVER HYDROELECTRIC STATION

1926–1929, UGI Contracting Company

200 Kent Road (U.S. Route 7), New Milford

FURTHER READING

American Society of Mechanical Engineers. “Rocky River Pumped-Storage Hydroelectric Station, New Milford, Connecticut.” National Historic Mechanical Engineering Landmark documentation, September 13, 1980.

FIGURE 64. Rocky River Hydroelectric Station. Connecticut Trust for Historic Preservation