Grist Mill

    On a weekend trip to Rutland to watch E run the Crowley, I stop to fish in Chester on the way both up and down.  Up, I've just got time enough to try the upper Williams River around the Grist Mill, where Route 103 bears left into the Stone Village.  In other words, a few hundred yards from the house where I grew up.  Back in the day, before flooding knocked it out, a sizable dam was here, and you could reliably catch nice trout in the deep pools just below.  Above the dam were bullheads and suckers that you could always see looking down from the bridge.  

     The mill itself, a big red building with an old water wheel still attached, has been there a long time.  It's where Clarence Adams's long string of burglaries finally came to an end.  He was, by all appearances, a leading citizen:  state representative, town selectman, church deacon, incorporator of the Chester Savings Bank.  But for nearly 16 years he burglarizing numerous homes and every store on Main Street at least once, some as many as six times.  He sympathized with the victims for their losses; suggested plans to capture the thief; and  offered money for a reward for the thief's capture.  He finally was caught in 1902 when Charles Waterman, who owned the mill, rigged a window with a shotgun that would blast anyone trying to break in.  Adams was wounded, caught, convicted, and sentenced to ten years in prison, although he escaped and fled to Canada.  Far and away the biggest drama that Chester has seen.

   There was an art gallery in the mill when I lived in town.    My mother sent me there for art lessons one summer when I was very young.  She believed, as mothers will do, that her children all had some artistic talent that only needed to be found and released.  Speaking for myself, this was not true, like a lot of things about me that turned out to be untrue.  

   There was, in any event, no particular drama at the grist mill on this fine summer afternoon.  Nor any trout that would rise to my flies.