A River of Dreams
by Anthony Lee

August 8 - September 6, 2014

Ophelia's Fate by Anthony Lee

Begun in the 1820s, the Hampshire and Hampden canal was an attempt to connect Northampton by waterway to New Haven and facilitate the easy movement of goods and peoples. It was an ambitious project by almost any measure, requiring a substantial displacement of soil and woods, building of dams, feeder streams and waste weirs, and a plentiful supply of money to fund the often torturous (and occasionally comic) construction. In Northampton, the canal ran along the west side of modern day South Street to what is today State Street, then known as Canal Street. The canal continued north crossing King Street at Damon Road until it emptied into the Connecticut River.

Old Canal, Photographer Unknown

The canal was a disaster from the start. It was more expensive to build and operate than anyone had anticipated, the horde of travelers never materialized, the goods barely trickled back and forth, beavers and muskrats repeatedly destroyed its sandy banks, and the railroads soon made it obsolete. By 1846, it was defunct. Over time, its route was mostly covered over, and other kinds of construction, including many other hair-brained schemes, were built on its remains. There are only slivers of evidence on the landscape that it once existed, an astonishing invisibility considering the size and scope of the original project.

Easthampton Leaves by Anthony Lee

A River of Dreams displays seven large contemporary photographs by Anthony Lee, who finds traces of the canal in Easthampton and Northampton and muses on a landscape marked by ambition and ruin and time’s way with entrepreneurial desire. It also exhibits many artifacts from the collection of Historic Northampton related to the canal, including early daguerreotypes, stockholder shares, advertisements, and later photographs. Anthony Lee is an historian of photography and a documentary photographer.  He is the Idella Plimpton Kendall Professor of Art History at Mount Holyoke College.