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!

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.

Steampunk, Meet Dieselpunk: Happy Birthday Raymond Loewy

Raymond Loewy poses on the pilot cowling of his modified PRR K4s, shadowed by its true inner self on the track behind.

Disclaimer: we’re well aware this may appear to fall under the purview of Dieselpunk, rather than Steampunk, but underneath Raymond Loewy’s glorious steel shrouding ticked and hissed the polished pistons and connecting rods of a mighty steam-driven locomotive.  Just sayin’.

History is one of those things that happens when you’re not looking. We often don’t have the perspective to understand what may be unfolding – right in front of one’s eyes – until afterward (sometimes significantly so), when a context and a critical mass has been established. A pundit or two takes analytical stab at it and names the events or trends or movements, and we can say “Ah, that was in the the golden era of the Steam Age” or “straight out of the Roaring Twenties” or “it was a remnant of the last days of Colonialism.” On top of that, there’s the axiomatic observation “History repeats itself:” perhaps a result of the former myopia or, more often,  in spite of it. Add in the cyclic caprices of fashion and popular culture and you have a perfect retro-future generator. The Pennsylvania Railroad found a master practitioner in the person of legendary industrial designer Raymond Loewy: his 120th birthday (1893-1986) was yesterday, November 5th. Google featured this observation in their Doodle on the search engine’s start page.

The Pennsylvania Railroad’s K4s in street clothes at Altoona, 1937.

The K4s before and after Loewy’s Cinderella act. Nicely executed!

Loewy was hired to help the Pennsylvania Railroad recast themselves as an appealingly modern, efficient, and superior mode of transportation (the rise of the private automobile was seriously affecting revenues) and, especially, a better choice over competitors such as the New York Central, which was waging its own image-remake battle. A designer, not an engineer, Raymond Loewy gave Pennsy’s motive power an eye-catching makeover. Eager to show the traveling public their embrace of the post-Depression, forward-looking Streamline Era, the first to get the “treatment” was the Pacific K4s class, the workhorse of the roundhouse stable and generally considered one of the greatest steam locomotives of all time. Number 3768 was the lucky duckling chosen for the swan costume: it was dubbed the “Torpedo” but underneath that sleek, swept steel jacket was the same old drive train, linkages, firebox, and boiler that powered these dependable and prolific beasts. Eventually, all of the streamlined units were stripped of their glamorous sheaths and they went back to service in work-clothes, and finally to the scrapheap. There are only two examples of the once plentiful K4 Class remaining: No. 3750 is on display at the Railroad Museum of Pennsylvania in Strasburg; No. 1361 was set to be restored to operation by the Railroaders Memorial Museum in Altoona through the restoration shop at Steamtown National Historic Site in Scranton, PA (and not too long ago in Bellows Falls, VT –  just 25 miles up the track from Fuller Steam Division in Brattleboro, VT).  The restoration has been stalled for now and the loco lies in pieces on the shop floor.

The New York Central’s reworked No. 54 Hudson locomotive shows a powerful, muscular profile.

A heart of steam and a love for the beauty of the mechanical: one of the attributes of the Steampunk movement, of course. But to some minds, it runs a bit deeper than just shroudings upon the machine; not just an iconic industrial designer’s skin-deep take on a quotidian industrial application, not just a retro-future costume at a convention center near you. There’s something more about the attraction of this still-growing phenomenon that sparks an identification with an honesty of construction, an intrinsically explicit demonstration of purpose, and a realm of possibility, if not actuality. Steampunk has a bit of the neo-Luddite wrapped up in its DNA and this aspect would bear further scrutiny: others more qualified have done so already, and hopefully we’ll take a look at them in future views from the Observatory.

Objective Inspiration: Vermont Farm Machinery Co. Machine Oiler

A beautiful example of a nickel-plated drip-feed machine oiler, manufactured by the Vermont Farm Machinery Company of Bellows Falls, VT. Oil reservoir, angled feed arm with vacuum breaker port, and machine attachment fitting. Brass, glass, and class…

Fuller Steam Division brings you the second in a series of vintage objects that evoke the spirit of the Steampunk movement: mechanical technology, explicit functionality, a legacy of inventiveness. At the turn of the nineteenth century, Vermont was a center of industrious pursuit, harnessing the water power of its rivers and brooks, connecting small towns with larger cities by railroad, and creating the tools and products needed for the Industrial Age with steam-powered shops, mills, and factories. The gritty town of Bellows Falls on the Connecticut River epitomized this busy period of New England history: one of its most successful manufacturing concerns was the Vermont Farm Machinery Company.

End view of the VFM Co. drip-feed machine oiler, showing the point-of-attachment fitting.

Established in the booming river town in 1868, the company was originally called the Hartford Sorghum Machine Company and made sap evaporators. This equipment was used to boil maple sap in the production of maple syrup, an agricultural endeavor in which Vermont still leads the nation, nearly 150 years later. The firm’s name was changed to the Vermont Farm Machinery Company in 1873 and the product line diversified rapidly, evolving toward the dairy industry, which had begun to surpass sheep farming in the 1850’s. For decades after, farming in the state was dominated by the production of milk for New England’s metropolitan markets – Boston was a short refrigerated train trip away – and the company grew rapidly. They produced the Cooley Creamer, invented by William Cooley of Waterbury in 1877, and it became their flagship device, used on the majority of New England Farms by the late 1880’s. In addition, they developed and manufactured a myriad of other lines, including machine butter churns, separators, presses, bottle washers, coolers, and steam engines and boilers. At one time the largest manufacturer of farm machinery in the world, and one of Bellows Falls most significant employers with hundreds of workers, the company fell on hard times and shuttered the doors of its great three-story brick plant in 1925.

Top view, showing the maker’s stamp, the knurled drip valve nut with spring clip keeper in the foreground, and the pivoting cover for the fill port behind the nut.

Machines need lubrication for their constantly moving parts such as bearings, bushings, gearboxes, and pump housings, and manufacturers invented a number of devices for this never-ending maintenance task. An attachment known as a drip machine oiler was a common solution: a sealed vessel on an arm attached to the part in need of lubrication held an amount of oil (replenished periodically by hand) and this was fed steadily, drop by drop, into the area of friction, by gravity. Typically the vessel is a glass cylinder (for visual inspection), a bottom feed outlet leading to the mounting arm, and a cap with provision for replenishment (a fill port) and control of the dispensing rate of the lubricating oil. Constructed of brass, plated steel, glass, and other durable materials, these simple yet effective  parts can last for many years of service; they are still used today, albeit with more modern material components. They might not last as long as their vintage counterparts, but the operating principal still works just fine. Part of the allure of steampunk, however, is all about technology which has withstood the test of time, and sparks the imagination of a world where things that whir, click, and hiss can be understood and depended upon, whatever may come along.

I came upon this beautiful little find in a local antique shop and was delighted to learn that it originated from nearby, just 20 miles up the Connecticut River. Bellows Falls, like Brattleboro, was a beehive of activity in the days of steam, and its past lives on in many forms, from small machined parts to hulking historic structures. Well-made objects, and the stories they can tell, or fuel, in the case of Fuller Steam Division, create a perfect imagination engine, generating a fascinating take on history, whether real, speculative, or alternate. Holding something solid in one’s hand, the past becomes palpable and the fictional is substantiated. How much fun is that?

Quotidian Steampunk: A Clockwork Roomscape

 

Second in the series of “Quotidian Steampunk” discoveries: scenes captured with an iphone in the course of a regular day-in-the-life of a modern Vermonter (no comments there, please)…  New England is a treasure trove of recombinant imagery: our steam- and water-powered past seasons our 21st-Century lives at home, in town, and in our attitudes and mindset. The echoing industry of past enterprising Yankee generations reverberates through the physical evidence still amongst us – workaday and ornate brickwork, rusted steel rails and bridges, glass and gilt furnishings, brass and turned wooden mechanisms…