Remembering the Essex Rope Walk
This is not a story of the wide sweep of history, but one of a moment in the past so ordinary that no one noticed or suspected at the time that it would ever be special. And yet the unknown writer who penned the recollection for the local newspaper on March of 1893 sees, with the passage of time, that the present becomes the past, that the once-commonplace events of our lives slowly, inexorably, turn into history.
The Essex rope walk, located in the middle of the town, was hard to miss. Some 800 feet long and 20 feet wide, it extended from what is now North Main Street down to the Connecticut River at North Cove, and included a 2-story office at one end and a tar house next door. Inside, a dozen or so men turned bales of hemp, manila and flax and barrels of tar and oil into lengths of rope for the local shipbuilding industry. Fibers were twisted into yarn, yarns into strands, and those into rope along the great length of the wooden building, using clanking, clattering machinery powered by a horse in the basement below. Built in 1817, and a thriving business for well over a half-century, it was also a wondrous play-scape to the children of 19th-century Essex, venturing from their school houses at The Academy, Pound Hill or the Point.
“Every recess, some in every school would run down to the rope walk,” our writer begins. There was a little cellar where “not a ray of light penetrated, and [we] children would dare to go in, where there was an old horse going round and round all day long hitched to a beam, which turned a wheel that twisted the ropes” in the building above. The youngsters would watch their chance and when the horse had passed the door, they’d spring onto one of the heavy beams and ride around.
The walk above held its own fascinations and rituals. At the far end of the building was a crank used to coil up the new-made rope on a big spool, and the children would run down the mighty length of the walk, take a swing on the heavy handle, and run then run back. Sometimes they’d challenge each other to walk the length of the wooden rail which ran down the middle of the building – without falling off. “We have never known it to be accomplished,” the unknown author writes.
Then, there was the fascinating Mr. Hannah. A long-time employee, his job was to walk backwards, up and down the walk, all day long, with a large bundle of flax wound about his waist, feeding strands to the twisting rope. We children, the author writes, used to wonder how many times a day the old man walked backward up and down, and how many bundles of flax he could use in a day, but they never asked. “It is as well perhaps,” he concludes, “for if one child had thought of asking, the rest would all have had to ask the same questions, and the old man was not pleasant, at best.” Nor was his companion. Mr. Hannah “had a dog as homely as his master who always followed him up and down the walk and when he could bear no more from the children he would make the dog bark at them, which was the only thing to mar the happiness of the old rope walk.”
Before going back to their schools, the children made it a habit to stop in the office to be weighed [on the rope-weighing scales]. “No matter if we had been weighed in the morning we would wish to be weighed again in the afternoon,” he writes. “We never weighed twice alike, but it never entered our childish hearts that we were weighed incorrectly, as long as we got on the scales and off.” The shop manager, Daniel Andrews, performed the duty. He would also wind the children’s kite strings, if asked politely. “We thought him cross then, [but] we can see now he had lots of patience with us.” And then, recess or “dinner time” over, the children would scurry back to their schoolhouses, leaving the rope walk behind, unaware that they’d just done something special, something they would remember, fondly, in their later years; that they’d done history. That’s an awareness which comes with age. Our unknown author, looking back, says simply: “most of the many who have been associated with the old rope walk are dead [now] and the old building will be a thing of the past and only memories of the rope walk will remain.”
Editor’s note: The Essex rope walk had one last hurrah. In 1883, the Essex Cornet Band decided to hold a muster, inviting 11 bands and drum corps from around the state, and a crowd of hundreds was expected. Where to host them all? The only building in town large enough was the now-abandoned rope walk, dirty with dust and cob webs, filled with junk and smelling of tar. No matter. In the spirit of the day, supportive citizens got together, cleaned the rope walk out, filled it with cedar boughs to freshen the air and set up 400 feet of tables, covered with white cloths. The celebrants arrived, and were served a sumptuous dinner. A concert followed, “the consolidated band of 160 pieces playing that glorious tune, ‘Marching through Georgia’ with a vim and vigor that would have waked the dead,” reported the Connecticut Courant. “This was one of the greatest gala days that Essex ever had.”
Shortly afterwards, 100 feet of the rope walk collapsed after a heavy snowfall; it would never ring with voices again.
Image credit: 1836 woodcut by John Warner Barber courtesy of Essex Historical Society.