The Four Blocked Flows
An Exhibition of Buried Circulation in Shelburne Falls
©2026 John F. Sendelbach
Curatorial Introduction
The acquisition of the May 3, 1856, Arms Cemetery contract marks the first official, paid accession of the Mohawk Repair Institute. Purchased from an online antiquarian picker who recovered the document from an anonymous estate clearing in Maine, this deed is far more than a fragment of local ephemera. It provides a contractual snapshot of a town systematically re-engineered in the mid-19th century—a landscape where the same elite hands that dammed the river, channeled municipal capital, and constructed new civic spaces also signed off on the physical relocation of the dead.
Exhibition Overview: “The Four Blocked Flows” is an archival and topographical exhibition that uses the May 3, 1856, Arms Cemetery contract as a lens to analyze the systematic interruption of four interwoven systems of circulation in Shelburne Falls during the mid-19th century: biological (salmon), hydrological (streams), social (labor and capital), and memorial (the dead). The Mohawk Repair Institute presents this material not as antique nostalgia but as the evidentiary basis for design-driven interventions aimed at daylighting buried streams, re-marking forgotten graves, and restoring the town’s open circulation between past and present.
Center Case: The 1856 Deed — A Lens Through the Ground
At the physical and conceptual center of the gallery stands a single sheet of paper: the 1856 contract recording the sale of Plot 192, Range 4, in Arms Cemetery to Jonah King Patch for the sum of fifteen dollars. Patch was the premier early photographer of Shelburne Falls; his studio captured the physical features of the 19th-century village population, fixing their likenesses in chemical silver before their ancestral landscape was permanently altered.
While the document lacks Patch’s signature, the “President” line features the distinct ink of Ebenezer G. Lamson (1814–1891). In May 1856, Lamson was the driving force behind the Lamson & Goodnow Manufacturing Company. Having formally incorporated the firm as a joint-stock company in 1855, Lamson was rapidly scaling it into the premier cutlery enterprise in the United States.
Curatorial Note: Having the town’s chief industrialist sign as President of the cemetery association illustrates the complete consolidation of 19th-century municipal authority. The same small group of manufacturing elites who controlled the flow of the river and the employment of the living simultaneously oversaw the management and real estate of the deceased.
Gallery Panel Text
“For millennia, Atlantic salmon operated on an ancient biological loop, swimming upstream from the Atlantic Ocean to return to their ancestral spawning gravel in the cold upland tributaries of the Deerfield River. This cycle assumed an open, continuous aquatic circuit.”
By the mid-1850s, this continuity was broken. The construction of timber dams, corporate water-power raceways, and mill diversions optimized the river for industrial extraction while completely blocking upstream fish passage. Later municipal grading and paving operations sealed the remaining tributaries under asphalt.
Today, returning fish encounter a heavily engineered underworld of concrete culverts, subterranean iron pipes, and an improvised mechanical bypass system designed to force natural life through the very infrastructure that fractured its habitat.
Flow 2: The Hydrological Flow — The Buried Streams
Gallery Panel Text
“Before the Falls were fully industrialized, the village core was crisscrossed by small surface tributaries feeding the Deerfield River. As the commercial center expanded, these open waterways were redefined as infrastructural hazards that threatened foundations, flooded basements, and constrained real-estate values.”
In response, the town’s manufacturing and civic leadership entombed the streams. Minor brooks were diverted into stone-masonry arches, brick culverts, and concrete pipes, then backfilled and paved over to create uniform, buildable commercial lots. The village center achieved topographical stability through negative space: the surface was flattened for commerce, while the natural watershed was forced entirely underground.
Typical Village Street Cross-Section
Surface Layout: Asphalt pavement and commercial sidewalks
Sub-Base: 19th-century backfill and graded macadam
Concealed Conduit: Masonry arch or concrete pipe (buried brook)
Flow 3: The Social Flow — Labor, Capital, and the Mill Race
Gallery Panel Text
“The industrial expansion of the 1850s re-routed human populations with the same hydraulic logic applied to the river. The Lamson & Goodnow works became the central nervous system of the valley’s economy.”
By the onset of the Civil War, the company’s centralized operations employed well over one hundred laborers; during the peak wartime production boom, this number swelled to more than five hundred workers. To maintain this social metabolism, the town’s geography was re-engineered to channel human beings efficiently.
Labor, largely comprised of newly arrived immigrant groups, was funneled into dense company-dependent housing clusters along Water Street and its immediate peripheries. Capital, machinery, and raw goods flowed along strict rail lines and engineered grids. Civic institutions, including academies, libraries, and churches, were systematically sited to anchor and discipline this concentrated workforce, organizing human movement into predictable, productive shifts.
Flow 4: The Memorial Flow — From the Hill to the Terrace
Gallery Panel Text
“Shelburne’s original burial ground, Hill Cemetery, was established around 1767 on Old Village Road, forming a tight moral-topographical core at the crest of the hill near the First Congregational Church. As industrialization pulled the living down to the river, a compact village-center burying ground emerged on the hillside directly above the Falls, overlooking Main Street.”
By the mid-1850s, this central burial ground stood in the direct path of rapid village expansion. The land was deemed too valuable for the dead; it was required for the construction of Arms Academy, the public library, and high-value commercial storefronts.
In November 1854, Major Ira Arms donated approximately 13 acres on the Buckland terrace to establish a modern “rural cemetery”—a picturesque, landscaped layout modeled on romantic New England developments like Boston’s Mount Auburn Cemetery (1831). In June 1856, the lot owners formally incorporated the Arms Cemetery Association under President E.G. Lamson, and by November, the association voted to auction off the old village burying ground.
The Ancestral Shuffle
- Exhumation: Remains disinterred from the old village hill
- Logistics: Gravestones and coffins loaded onto wagons
- Transit: Hauled across the river to the Buckland side
- Re-planting: Inserted into Lamson’s surveyed cemetery grid
This corporate reordering resulted in a massive, messy logistical undertaking. Families were forced to disinter their ancestors, move the 1820s slate and marble stones across the river, and re-inter them within the standardized grid of the new cemetery.
The transition was incomplete; during subsequent excavations for Arms Academy, unrecovered coffins and skeletal fragments were periodically unearthed by construction crews, proving that the modern town center was literally built on top of a fractured memory.
Conclusion: The Archive of Intervention
The four systems of circulation explored in this exhibition—Biological, Hydrological, Social, and Memorial—were not altered by accident. They were systematically re-engineered during the exact same decades, under the direction of the same consolidated manufacturing and civic elite. The dams, the brick culverts, the company housing, and the standardized cemetery grid were all components of a singular mid-19th-century campaign to restructure the valley for industrial capitalization.
The Mohawk Repair Institute does not present these artifacts to cultivate passive antiquarian nostalgia. “Repair” is an active design methodology. By using the 1856 Jonah King Patch deed as a diagnostic lens to expose the precise historical moments where the town’s geography was fractured, the Institute builds the evidentiary foundation required to challenge the built environment.
The long-term objective is to turn this historical analysis into physical design responses: advocating for the daylighting of entombed streams, re-marking the forgotten burial footprints within the civic core, and restoring the open, uninterrupted circulation of both the natural watershed and the community’s memory.
Exhibition Specifications and Asset Catalog
Location: The Digital Gallery of the Mohawk Repair Institute
Digital Portal: High-resolution plates of all exhibition assets, full architectural cross-sections, and the complete integrated timeline can be accessed via the Institute’s digital archive portal at johnsendelbach.com, linking researchers directly to primary source records from the Massachusetts Historical Commission surveys and regional hydrological studies.