Exhibits & Collections An online exhibit
Images of a Forgotten Village: Valley Forge
Under the Saugatuck Reservoir lies a village of mills, forges and farms. Photographs are nearly all that is left of it.
Valley Forge stood on the east branch of the Saugatuck River in the north of Weston: a dam and mill pond, a sawmill, a foundry and iron works, a blacksmith, a store, a one-room school and the farmhouses of the families who worked them. In the 1920s and 1930s the Bridgeport Hydraulic Company bought the valley for a reservoir. The dam went up in the late 1930s and was completed in 1942, and the water closed over the valley.
This exhibit began in the Center's gallery, from April 2025 to March 2026, made with the Weston Library Photography Club. Here are the Center's own Valley Forge photographs: glass plates taken by a man who grew up there, a published view of the mill row, the gorge at Devil's Glen, the school, and the valley from the air just before it was flooded.
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A forge on the Saugatuck gives the place its name.
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Charles Whitlock photographs his neighbors on glass plates.
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A view of the mill row is published.
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The dam is completed, and the valley lies under the reservoir.
The mill row
This view was published in 1903. In 1990 Anson Morton, who had gone to the Valley Forge School as a boy, named the buildings for the Historical Society. Every one of them is now under the reservoir.
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The dam
Holding back the mill pond on the Saugatuck. The water fell evenly along its whole length.
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Hull's Sawmill
Later Osborn's sawmill.
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Hull's Foundry
It cast small iron parts. The road crosses the river on the truss bridge beside it.
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The Pattern Shop
Where the wooden patterns for the foundry's moulds were made.
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Blacksmith Shop sign
The photographer stood in front of the blacksmith shop, facing east.
A working village
Everything here ran on falling water. The river dropped through a rocky gorge, there was timber for charcoal, and there was iron to be had.
The founding story most often told is the Sanford family's. Ephraim Sanford ran an iron works upstream in Redding until a spring flood wrecked it in 1805; his son Oliver moved about three miles down the Saugatuck to a spot then called Princetown, and added a forge. In time the place took its name from it. Another tradition credits Welsh settlers of the 1700s.
By 1867 Valley Forge was busy enough to get an inset map of its own in the Beers atlas. Around the dam and mill pond on the East Branch stood a sawmill, B. Hull's foundry and iron works, F. Buckley's machine shop and iron works, and a second machine shop, with the houses of the Hulls, Whitlocks, Sanfords, Wheelers and Bankses along the roads. The atlas's business directory lists three firms: B. Hull, proprietor of the foundry and machine shop; B. F. Buckley, iron works and machine shop; and C. G. Whitlock, dealer in groceries and provisions.
Iron goods, from hoes to oxcart wheels, went by horse and wagon to Westport to be shipped. Downstream, toward Lyons Plains, Gould's mill ground grain.
Some of the tools these shops made and used are in Weston at Work, in the Coley Barn.
Faces at the door: the Whitlock glass plates
Charles H. D. Adelbert Whitlock (1847–1902) was born in Valley Forge, the son of C. G. Whitlock, “dealer in groceries and provisions”, whose store stood by the road. In the 1880s Charles carried a camera from door to door and photographed his neighbors outside their houses, on glass-plate negatives.
In 1969 a young man of 19, whose mother had been born in Valley Forge, found a small wooden box of those plates while clearing a family building near Georgetown. Burry Fredrik, a longtime Weston resident, researched them with Jim Daniel, and prints from the plates have been shown in Weston ever since: at Town Hall in 2000, and in this exhibit.
The doctor calls
Dr. Gorham, the village doctor, in his buggy outside the Hull house, about 1882. Bradley Hull had married Sarah Adelle Whitlock, the photographer's sister; their son Clinton was born about then.
A jug on the bench
Four men and a woman at a shingled saltbox, a stoneware jug on the bench and a pitcher in hand. The exhibit's label read it as a visit for cider. The house was later moved out of the valley to another road in Weston.
The white cow
A boy holds the family's white milk cow by a rope around her horns. She had just “come in”, calved and started giving milk: worth a photograph. The label suggests this was a schoolmaster's family.
March 1888 · A memory
Snowed in at the Squires house
Plate 11 shows the Squires family's low clapboard house. Lillian Squires was five when the Great Blizzard of 1888 buried the valley. She remembered her mother scooping snow in through a window to melt on the stove for water, and men standing up in the maple trees to dig Godfrey Road out of drifts twenty feet deep.
Plates 6 and 10 are photographed from the framed exhibit prints, so the glass shows in places; Plate 8 is a flat scan of its print.
The school and the Glen
Valley Forge's children walked to a one-room school. Anson Morton went there before moving on to the Lyons Plain School; families recalled a schoolmaster there in earlier years.
Below the dam the river crashed through Devil's Glen, a gorge of tumbled rock with a footbridge across it. Visitors came out to see it, and it turns up on cards and postcards.
The water comes
The Bridgeport Hydraulic Company bought up the valley farm by farm through the 1920s and 1930s. Not everyone went quietly. John Young, a co-founder of the advertising agency Young & Rubicam, led a campaign to save Valley Forge with broadsides, teas and theater benefits, and in 1937 a magazine called the fight “the Battle of Valley Forge”.
In 1938 the town settled: the company paid $40,000 for the roads the dam would cut and agreed to build new ones. The company did not want the houses. Owners could sell them or move them away; a few were hauled to other roads in Weston. Those left behind were burned, so that their timbers would not float up through the water.
The dam, named for Samuel P. Senior, was built in the late 1930s and completed in 1942. The reservoir covers 635 acres and holds more than 12 billion gallons, piped to Norwalk and Bridgeport. Read more on the Saugatuck Reservoir page.
Who remembered Valley Forge
- Anson Morton named the 1903 buildings in 1990 and, in 1992, marked on an 1867 map what became of each house: moved, burned, or left to the water.
- Burry Fredrik and Jim Daniel researched the Whitlock plates. Jim Daniel's booklet How Things Were in Valley Forge came out in the late 1990s.
- The Weston Library Photography Club photographed what is left of the valley for the 2025–26 exhibit, which also showed film of the dam being built.
- Heather Pemberton, a Weston native, set her thriller Hidden Below around a village drowned under a local reservoir, and talked about it at the Center on the exhibit's opening day.
Help us
Do you know more?
If your family lived in Valley Forge, or you have photographs, letters or stories from the valley, the Center would love to hear from you. A photograph can be scanned and handed straight back.
Email info@westoncthistory.orgSources
Photographs and the 1867 map (the Beers atlas, page 36, “Town of Weston”) from the collection of the Weston History & Culture Center. The glass-plate notes follow the labels made for the framed prints; Anson Morton's identifications are on the 1903 print's mount (1990) and an annotated 1867 Beers atlas map (1992); the 1930 aerial view carries a note of 1992. Also James Lomuscio, “Valley Forge: Weston's Village of the Dammed”, Westport magazine, October 2000. Sources differ on some points, such as whether the plates were found in a garage or a barn, and when the reservoir was finished (“about 1939” in a 1992 note; the dam was completed in 1942); this page gives what they agree on.