Vermont Steampunk Hero: Happy Birthday Levi Fuller!

A Gilman Four-in-One milling machine from the collection at the amazing American Precision Museum in Windsor, VT. The only known surviving example (source here).

One hundred seventy three years ago on February 24, 1841, on a family farm in Westmoreland, New Hampshire, Levi Knight Fuller was born. A descendant of some of the earliest European settlers of New England, he landed squarely in the Victorian era, and personified the accomplishments of the Gilded Age in the United States. Fuller Steam Division is an historically grounded steampunk enterprise inspired by the life and times of this man, and is headquartered in his eventual hometown, Brattleboro, Vermont – on Fuller Drive, no less, on a remnant of his former estate.

Gov. Levi Knight Fuller 1841-1896 (bio on Wikipedia)

Let’s take a quick look at this confluence of history and popular culture: what does the life of Levi K. Fuller, a once-prominent but now largely-forgotten Vermonter, have to do with the modern-day pop culture movement dubbed steampunk? Perhaps outlining the two will produce some correlations and comparisons. Steampunk is, after all, a multi-disciplinary genre which is drawn from historical antecedent and – right there – we are off to a good start! Steampunk has been defined in many ways, some more restrictive than others (which some might say flies in the face of its fantastic potential) but for simplicity let us refer to the most widely referenced statement on the subject, by the author G.D. Falksen.

A Victorian organ steampunked into a computer command center by the master Bruce Rosenbaum of ModVic in Sharon, MA.  New England and Steampunk go together like pistons and connecting rods: see more of the regional  oeuvre by Jake von Slatt, who took this photo.

Falksen’s “What Is Steampunk?”  states summarily that Steampunk is Victorian science fiction (think of  progenitors Jules Verne and H.G. Wells), but goes on to elaborate on what that might entail today. Basically, the idiom is grounded in the industrialized 19th century, extrapolated through modern eyes and experience to an imagination of what may have been, given that setting and mentality. An alternate or speculative history can be woven from the fabric of mechanical technology, social reconstruction, expanding scientific knowledge, and grand opportunity (albeit, not for all). With such a rich and diverse heritage of inspiration to draw from,  a wide range of expression is enabled on many fronts: literature, fashion, applied technology, the fine arts, industrial design, the dramatic arts…

The Estey Organ Company complex: a National Register Historic Site on Birge St. in Brattleboro, VT Photo from FSD on Instagram

Levi Fuller was born into this time period and he epitomized many of its signature traits. A very brief enumeration: beginning a lifelong pursuit of knowledge at a very young age, he learned telegraphy and the printing trade at 13. With an early knack for science and engineering, he apprenticed with a firm in Boston at 16, returned to Brattleboro at 19 and found employment with Jacob Estey at his parlor organ manufactory. He proved his merit and rose quickly in the ranks, marrying his employer’s only daughter and becoming Vice-President of J. Estey and Co.;  an indefatigable researcher, he had over 100 patents to his credit, and amassed a considerable fortune in the process. He founded and funded the Fuller Light Battery, a local militia unit; he collected what was considered the most complete technical and scientific library in the state of Vermont, alongside the finest equatorial telescope on the East coast, at his Pine Heights mansion on a hill above the town and near the organ factory. Philanthropist and benefactor, he championed and participated in several institutions of higher learning. He was elected handily to the office of Lieutenant Governor and then Governor of Vermont, and initiated many lasting and significant innovations on behalf of his beloved State. He is credited (by William Steinway, no less) with bringing about the adoption of the world’s first standard pitch for instrument tuning. He travelled constantly, both abroad and domestically, in fulfillment of his professional and civic responsibilities, and moved in the highest circles. Well-dressed and distinguished in appearance, Fuller was everywhere and knew everyone, and seemed to have a significant impact on almost everything he touched. Sadly, his non-stop pace and devotion to duty were not sustainable and he died at the age of 55, on October 10, 1896, from overwork and exhaustion.

Bas relief portrait of Gov. Levi Knight Fuller on his grave‘s memorial marker at Morningside Cemetery on South Main St. in Brattleboro. His wife Abby Emily Estey lies beside him there.

In those 55 years of the late 19th century, he accomplished the work of several lifetimes, in an age when that scale of achievement was enabled and encouraged – a time and ethos we now celebrate in the Steampunk movement. Fuller Steam Division draws its references and personae directly from the life and times of Gov. Levi Knight Fuller and we feel this gives us a rare credence, a grounding that can deeply inform our creations and our story, crafting it from the material and archival evidence and circumstances which we uncover, both here in Brattleboro, Vermont and on the web. The word STEAM in our name is an acronym for the disciplines which Fuller pursued and from which we extrapolate with our work: Speculative Technology, Engineering, and Mechanics. We hope you will follow our adventures in Vermont Steampunk through the heritage of Levi K. Fuller. It promises to be an interesting journey!

Fuller Park and the Esteyville Bandstand

The silent bandstand at Fuller Park on a late January afternoon.

Toward the southwest corner of Brattleboro, in the center of what was and is known as Esteyville, is a small and somewhat forgotten park. Situated on a triangular lot at the intersection of Estey, Pleasant, and Chestnut Streets, Fuller Park holds a worn bandstand, an empty flagpole, a tired bench, and a half-dozen shade trees. The town’s Grand List has it pegged at .19 acres and the official address is 115 Estey Street; it’s right across the road from the diminutive Esteyville Schoolhouse, another municipal property from another time, but still in use.

The Town of Brattleboro’s facilities map shows the Esteyville properties west of Canal Street.

Also known as the Esteyville Park or Esteyville Common, its heritage as the bequest of Levi K. Fuller to the residents of the neighborhood has faded. A Google search for Fuller Park in Brattleboro turns up only a few scattered references; the other names have usurped its position in the modern landscape – the town itself (the official landholder) catalogs it as Esteyville Park. It’s still available for public use: the half-day fee is $30 or $100 depending on the entity seeking approval.

Historical photo of Estey Street looking southeast toward Maple and Canal Streets (park lot on right) from “Picturesque Brattleboro” 1894.

These residences and quiet streets are part of a large piece of land purchased by Jacob Estey in 1869, parts of the Dickinson and Rufus Clark farms; he subdivided and sold lots to his employees to build themselves homes and create a community adjacent to the organ factory, a short walk just east and downhill. Levi Knight Fuller was Estey’s son-in-law; he had entered his employ in 1860, at the age of 19 years, as a mechanical engineer and rapidly proved his worth, quickly becoming superintendent of manufacturing. He married the boss’s only daughter Abby Emily in 1865 and was made Vice-President of the firm in 1866, forming a family triumvirate with the elder Estey as President and his son, Julius J., who held the office of Treasurer. In June of 1886, Fuller, who was Lieutenant Governor of the State of Vermont by this time, in addition to his many other duties, made his gift to the people of Esteyville. According to Dennis Waring’s fascinating book ‘Manufacturing the Muse: Estey Organs and Consumer Culture in Victorian America’,  “…Fuller presented the town with an attractively landscaped park in Esteyville, which included a bandstand for the newly-formed Esteyville Brass Band.”

 

Fuller Park on Google Maps Streetview for 115 Estey Street, Brattleboro, VT.

The bandstand is one of two in the town of Brattleboro and is still used occasionally for performances. It is hexagonal in shape, with a solid foundation built of rock-faced, or rusticated, concrete block about six feet high – there’s a locked steel door into the interior under the structure’s floor. Several sources make reference to the shelter’s base as housing a fire fighting cart for the safety of the neighborhood’s homes. The smallish door, along with the fact that rock-faced block were used primarily in the early part of the twentieth century, makes one think perhaps the foundation is not original. I have found another reference to the existence of a large cistern, again for fire fighting purposes (the park is uphill from the factory buildings on Birge Street) near or under the bandstand; the disposition of this reservoir has yet to be determined.

The bandstand, flagpole, and bench at Fuller Park in January, 2014.

Oddly enough, there are no stairs leading up to the bandstand’s floor and no breaks in the simple white railing which encloses the six sides, connecting columns which hold up a beaded wood ceiling and the slate and metal roof. A narrow band of dentil molding pairs with the simple Doric columns and a heavy cornice to effect a simple Greek Revival style; empty light bulb sockets punctuate the underside of the cornice – it must have been a cheery, bright sight when they were all lit for an evening concert. The construction is nearly identical to the one other such edifice in town, the Blanche Honegger Moyse Bandstand on the Town Common, just north of the downtown district; this begs the speculation that perhaps the Fuller Park bandstand was substantially rebuilt at the same time the other was erected. Any further information will be added here as it’s uncovered! And there will be more on Esteyville, I am sure, as well as many other interesting encounters in Brattleboro history and the life of Levi Knight Fuller.

 

Levi K. Fuller’s Early Adventures in Steam

An 1855 lithograph shows the town of Bellows Falls looking westward from Table Rock on Fall Mountain, a popular vantage point on the New Hampshire side of the Connecticut River. The Island is in the foreground, with the Vermont Valley Railroad approaching from the south (left), the Cheshire Railroad from the east (double track covered bridge in lower right), and the Rutland and Burlington Railroad from the north (right).

Levi Knight Fuller had his tenth birthday in the year 1851; it was the same year the Vermont Valley Railroad Company drove its landmark 278-foot-long tunnel underneath the town center of Bellows Falls, Vermont. Levi’s family had moved from Westmoreland, New Hampshire, where he was born in 1841, to Vermont’s Windham County when the lad was 4 years old. Some accounts mention the family as relocating to Bellows Falls, but others, which seem more definitive – one source cites Fuller as a co-author, which is ample witness – put the family in Westminster, a smaller town just 5 miles down the road. Another source phrases it as an eventuality: the family ended up in Bellows Falls after their initial venture into the area in 1845.

The northern portal of the Vermont Valley Railroad Company’s 1851 tunnel beneath the center of Bellow Falls, the tracks turning toward Brattleboro, 24 miles south on the west bank of the Connecticut River.  Above this tunnel, out of sight, are the roads and brick and wood-frame buildings of the downtown business district.

The Vermont Valley Railroad Co. (chartered Nov. 8, 1848; amended Oct. 6, 1849) was the third to reach Bellows Falls, fast becoming a booming industrial and transportation hub on the Connecticut River. The company had built its 24-mile-long right-of-way on the west bank of the Connecticut River starting north from Brattleboro in 1850; it connected the Vermont and Massachusetts Railroad there with the two roads already stationed at the Falls: the Cheshire (connecting with Boston) and the Rutland and Burlington. The unusual tunnel under the downtown was necessitated by the Vermont Valley’s approach from the west side of the river to what was known as “The Island”, a section of land created when the Bellows Falls Canal was opened in 1802, bypassing the Great Falls on the Connecticut. The island was the site of the railroads’ junctions, the switching yards, engine houses, and the accompanying passenger and freight stations and maintenance buildings. Levi Fuller would eventually spend the rest of his mature days residing in Brattleboro near the southern terminus of the VVRR, but as a young farm boy growing up near the iron rails approaching the interchange through the fertile bottomlands of Westminster, it must have been a wondrous time.

The Bellows Falls railroad tunnel  seen from the south portal, diving under the center of Bellows Falls and heading toward the bridge over the canal and the junction on the Island.

Young Levi showed a proclivity for mechanical tinkering and a thirst for knowledge at a very early age. In his own words, taken from a speech he delivered late in life (1893) entitled “Vermont In a Century of Invention”, he recalled “a small steam engine which he made when a boy of 10, using for its cylinder the brass tube of a small spy-glass. Work upon this, he said, determined the course of his future life.” The type of steam engine model he built is unknown – he describes the brass tube’s function as the cylinder, whether vertical or horizontal, and of the boiler and valving we know nothing, but he had plenty of inspiration nearby in the form of mills, locomotives, and other industrial and agricultural equipment. This set him on the path he would avidly pursue for the rest of his days.

A modern-day solid brass oscillating steam engine miniature; basic yet elegant. Levi Fuller’s first model would have been  simpler and built of  found materials, but showed his early bent for mechanical engineering.

At the tender age of 13, Levi Fuller left home and headed south to Brattleboro, where he found employment at a printing establishment, learned telegraphy, attended the Brattleboro High School, and continued his self-studies and mechanical pursuits. At sixteen years old he built another steam engine with a new and novel valve arrangement of his own contrivance; he exhibited the machine at the Windham County Agricultural Society’s Annual Fair. His invention attracted much attention and the Society’s judges awarded him a premium for his accomplishment; this fueled his desire for greater scientific understanding and technical proficiency and he left Brattleboro for Boston to apprentice with a mechanical engineering firm. It seems the year would have been 1857; one source indicates the year as 1856, but this remains to be pinpointed. Levi Knight Fuller was well on his way to finding his calling and following his muse.

Quotidian Steampunk: Brass Plant Mister

Third in a series of everyday encounters, iPhone in hand, with items that elicit a steampunk’d reaction. A celebration of materials, honest mechanics, longevity, and a tactile attraction… The antithesis of disposably-priced, short-lived, flimsily-manufactured, and blindly-operated “stuff.”

Today’s subject is a simple hand-held houseplant humidifying device (not a brass “plant”, mister…): refillable, thumb-pumped, all-brass construction, task-oriented and obviously with a few years under its screw cap. The metal patinas over the years; the piston cylinder tips a bit from the pressure of many a thrust; the sides gain a dent or two – but it keeps going. If it leaks or stops spraying, it can be repaired. If it’s not needed for the moment, it sits in repose, gleaming in the sunlight with its handle and nozzle arcing gracefully as the houseplants it dutifully services. A paen, no doubt, to utilitarianism but a pleasingly simple and effective example. It’s not that hard to do things well. What are your preferences?

Extension Announced: Steampunk Springfield Submissions

A teaser for Bruce Rosenbaum’s personal contribution – dubbed Humachines – to next year’s Steampunk Springfield exhibition?

It has just come to our attention this morning (while stumbling through the aetherwebs) that the deadline for artist submissions for the upcoming grand exposition “Steampunk Springfield: ReImagining an Industrial City” has been extended at the last minute to November 22, 2013. We can throttle back on the power feed to the Time Machine and fall back on real time. Whew ! *puff of steam* Notice was discerned on the Fuller Steam Division’s Facebook feed from ModVic and Steampuffin, curator Bruce Rosenbaum’s inestimable steampunk enterprise in Sharon, Massachusetts. A quick jaunt to the fine print on the host’s site, Springfield Museums, confirmed the news. A toast (never too early, we say – what? it was just green Juicy Juice…) was raised to our imminent good fortune and we returned to the workshop bench here in Brattleboro, Vermont somewhat strengthened in our resolve.

Anyone else joining in? Tell all your New England compatriots and co-conspirators. It’s going to be a sight sure to fog your goggles. Mark your chronometers and set your airship auto-pilot to the proper coordinates:  North 42° 6′ 17.16″, West 72° 35′ 9.55″. Arrivals tethered from March 22nd til September 28, 2014.