In my last post, we saw how iron production in Brandon dominated the village at its peak around 1854. Running out of timber for charcoal production, combined with competition from the West, virtually ended iron mining and smelting in town by 1865. In the midst of this gradual collapse, a village resident named Abraham Twombley dug a hole in the ground that had very little economic or ecological impact on the town, but had very far-reaching scientific implications.
In November of 1858, Twombley hired a man to help him dig a well to provide his house with water. This well was probably located near Corona Street, although accounts of the exact location, or even which side of the street it was on, vary. The 1869 “Rutland County Atlas” map section below shows it between Corona and Maple Streets, but a New York Times account mentions that Mr. Twombley lived on the road to Sudbury. An August 1881 account in the “Gazetteer and Business Directory of Rutland County” places the well “southwest of the village on Road 37 ½,” which sounds a lot like the train to Hogwarts.
From “Atlas of Rutland County” by Beers, Ellis, and Soule, 1869
Regardless of the exact location, Hitchcock’s 1861 “Report on the Geology of Vermont” states that Abraham and his hired man dug through 10 feet of soil and gravel, followed by 4 feet of mainly clay, without hitting water. At that point, they encountered a 15-foot-thick layer of “frozen gravel, with quite large bowlders intermixed. Continuing the excavation 2 feet farther in the same materials, water was reached. The well was carried only a few feet deeper; its whole depth being not far from 35 feet. The frozen part which was passed through appeared precisely like the same materials frozen at the surface in winter.”
Although the well was substantially below the depth of frost in Vermont, that winter Mr. Twombley reported that ice 2 inches thick formed on the water overnight. He routinely sent his son more than 30 feet down the well on a rope with a hammer to break the ice to draw water for the house.
Now, unlike the Forest Dale giant frog story from which this column draws its title, this aptly named Frozen Well became news immediately. The following summer, several members of the Boston Natural History Society traveled to Brandon to view the well in an attempt to reproduce the results, one of the core tenets of the scientific method.
Charles Thomas Jackson, photo from “The American Geologist”
According to the “Vermont Record and Farmer” of March 27, 1863, the Society “liberally placed in the hands of the chair of this committee the sum of three hundred dollars to defray the expenses of their investigations.” The committee included one Charles T. Jackson, a Harvard-trained geologist and medical doctor who was also the brother-in-law of Ralph Waldo Emerson.
On August 30, this group employed men to dig a shaft 70 feet northwest of the Frozen Well. On September 21, they “sent men down in the afternoon, who after digging from apparently solid materials, sent up gravel frozen hard, though the ice clearly showed itself and melted in the hand.” They had independently verified that the frost was buried in place and had not somehow been introduced to the well.
Now it might be hard to think of the Ice Age as having a father, but Google seems to think that it does, and he was a Swiss scientist named Louis Agassiz. Eighteen years prior, in 1840, he published “Études sur les glaciers,” which is widely credited with bringing the study of glaciers and the succession of ice ages to global attention. His study of erratic boulders in the Swiss Alps led him to conclude that “great sheets of ice, resembling those now existing in Greenland, once covered all the countries in which unstratified gravel (boulder drift) is found.”
Geologist and biologist Jean Louis Agassiz
In the aftermath of Georges Cuvier’s theory of extinction (see Brandon’s Iron Bubble Bursts), glacial theory posed an additional conundrum for the prevailing theories of creation. An 1897 edition of New England Magazine boasts that Agassiz visited Brandon to see the Frozen Well, but I was not able to find this corroborated elsewhere, and Agassiz’s only well-documented visit to Vermont was in the 1840s. However, he lived in Boston from 1846 until his death in 1873, and it seems likely he was aware of and had an influence on the research of the Boston Natural History Society.
Interestingly, according to an 1867 New York Times article on Brandon’s anomaly, two other frozen well discoveries were reported in 1858: one in Ware, Massachusetts, and one in Oswego, New York. The Times article goes on to state that, “The Brandon deposit is probably about the age of what are called moraine terraces, produced by stranded icebergs, the sand and gravel among them being frozen at the time.” Moving on to explain how a subterranean iceberg could persist following the last ice age, the Times continues, “An inclined stratum of frozen clay above the mass, a stratum of loose pebbles around it, and the absence of any subterranean streams, seem to explain the phenomenon of frozen wells, which would be less rare were these conditions less rare.”
Long story short, the frozen wells in Brandon and elsewhere were likely the result of a 13,000-year-old chunk of permafrost created by a relatively rare intersection of conditions involving how large chunks of ice, frozen gravel, and clay were buried as the glaciers melted. Its discovery likely accelerated the acceptance of the scientific field of glaciology.
Frozen well, photo courtesy Brandon Museum
As time went on, Mr. Twombley (or his son) became tired of having to break the ice in the well, and they began drawing water from a neighbor’s well. Early in the twentieth century, gravel extraction changed either the hydrology in the area or the insulating qualities of the overburden, and the well melted. Now, even the exact location of the well is largely forgotten.
In a future column, I hope to explore the Brandon Hogback. Visible from Pearl Street, the Hogback is very close to the Frozen Well geographically, chronologically, and geologically.
In August, Wolf Tree Forest will be hosting an event on using game cameras to learn more about the wildlife in your yard or woods. More information here.
