This knife.
My mother’s extended family, Russian Jewish refugees, settled in the Connecticut River Valley, in Connecticut, in the early part of the 20th century.
They came to this region to farm because of the excellent soil turned up by the river itself.
My mother referred to this knife as the “bread knife” and it had belonged to one of her grandmothers, D’vorah, one of my great-grandmothers for whom I am named. Before my mother died, she gave me the knife.
And so, I found myself, years after coming to live in Greenfield, Mass., while working at a newspaper here – and in so doing, learning much about the history of this place – standing in my apartment holding this knife in my hand and pausing to read the stamp on the blade.
Russell. Green River Works.
A couple blocks away from where I was standing in my kitchen in an apartment in a building built around 1850 to house railroad workers, was the first site of this company – a factory powered by the Green River.
A couple of decades later, around 1870, the company moved over the low ridge to Turners Falls and expanded in a facility powered by the Connecticut River.
Standing there in the kitchen with this knife in my hand, I understood that much in my life has been shaped by these rivers. The knife had come home. #RiverWitness.
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The #RiverWitness campaign, a create community response and social media tool to connect the communities in the Connecticut River watershed in service to the advocacy work of The Connecticut River Conservancy, has been developed in partnership with the Collaborative Community Art Response Team (CCART) and The Art Garden, and is supported by a grant awarded by The Community Foundation of Western Massachusetts with funding from The Barr Foundation.
