The Human Stories of the Rockville Mill Complex
The climb to the old Dart Stone Mill wasn't for the faint of heart. My friend J and I huffed our way up that punishing incline, shirts clinging to our backs, calves screaming in protest. But we'd made this trek before, drawn back time and again to this crumbling monument perched high above Vernon, Connecticut. There's something about abandoned mills that gets under your skin, and this one had its hooks in us deep. When Albert Dart built this place back in 1868, he picked the most dramatic real estate in all of Rockville. The mill sits on a rock ledge at the second millseat below Snipsic Lake, clinging to the cliff face like it grew there naturally. And in a way, it may have. The lake fed water to nearly 39 mills as it descended through the valley, dropping ten inches in elevation along the way. That's a lot of industrial muscle powered by gravity alone. Dart built his mill for spinning silk and producing shoddy, a recycled wool material that was big business back th...