The gate-keepers house and recently repaired gates at Lock 12 in Chesire are among the best preserved structures of the 19th- century Farmington Canal. This canal once moved people and goods from New Haven, Connecticut to Northampton, Massachusetts.

November 24th, 1827, the first section of the canal opened with great fanfare and hopes ran high that it would be a grand success. But after only a few months of operation, troubles began cropping up. Cost-cutting measures taken to hold down the $1,039,041.61 price tag resulted in a rash of embankment collapses and other construction problems that forever plagued the canal.4 In addition, the age of faster, cheaper transport by railroads was dawning, making the Farmington Canal an anachronism almost from the start. The final blow came when the citizens of Hartford responded by building a successful canal of their own, the six-mile long Enfield Canal, which opened on November 10, 1829, and operates to this day carrying boats around the shoaly waters at Windsor. In short, the Farmington Canal proved to be a dismal failure. In 1847 a railroad line was laid directly over much of the towpath, sealing the fate of the longest canal ever built in New England. A canal just wasn't the way to beat the Metacomet Ridge. Metacomet Ridge consists of a dense, erosion-resistant rock called traprock or basalt. Traprock is entirely different from brownstone, which accounts in part for its almost opposite effect on landscape. It is an igneous rock, rather than a sedimentary rock, another of the three main types of rocks. (The third type, metamorphic rock, is the dominant rock of the Uplands but is not present in the Central Valley.) Igneous rocks form when hot magma from the Earth's deep interior cools and solidifies. Some of the Central Valley's traprock formed when magma reached the surface and flowed out as lava that subsequently cooled into rock. In other cases, traprock formed when rising magma didn't quite break through to the surface and instead cooled underground. The many parallel cracks that can be seen in most traprock are a sign of its igneous origin. These cracks, called columnar joints, formed as a result of a shrinking of the rock as it cooled, causing it to break into a regular pattern of vertical columns. Traprock is fairly easy to recognize, as rocks go, for it is both distinctively colored and unusually dense (i.e. any piece of traprock is substantially heavier than most other rocks of the same size). On the inside it is dark grey-green, while the outside surfaces are orange or reddish-orange. The orange color on the surface is basically a form of rust and results from the exposure of traprock to the elements.

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