A special treat for those in the Northwest Corner interested in the local 1734 - 1923 iron industry heritage will occur on Saturday, August 23. The Friends of Beckley Furnace will present the annual Blackberry River Walk along Lower Road in East Canaan, replete with new materials, tales and sights. The starting time is 9:30 AM at the East Canaan Congregational Church (Route 44 and Lower Road) with a suggested donation of five dollars. The Walk is cosponsored by the Upper Housatonic Valley Heritage Area and the Falls-Village Canaan Historical Society.

At the Church, after a welcome, Dr. William Adam will pass on new tales of his ancestors living and working in East Canaan, tracing back to 1739. Following this, participants will take the short walk down Lower Road to the 1869 Beckley Office Building, now being transformed into an Educational Center. With photos, paintings, documents and artifacts, this will be the focal point of the developing tri-State Iron Heritage Trail.

Iron Men Ed Kirby and Walt Landgraf and others will talk at the Furnace, again armed with new information and discoveries about the local production of iron. Those who wish may continue down Lower Road to a presentation by Walt Michaels, part of the iron making family that were Beckley's last tenders. He will be near the vineyards of the Land of Nod Winery and some participants may choose to continue on to sample the excellent wines of Dr. Adam's Winery.

The day should be both fun and informative, both for those who have walked before and for those wishing to begin learning about why they live on Old Forge Road, Puddlers' Lane or Ore Hill Road. Come join the fun.

CANAAN — Walter Michaels sat at the roadside at a small table, while behind him stretched vibrantly green rows of grapevines. From the soil beneath peeked shiny rocks tinted green or blue. And if one were to dig a hand in, it would come up stained with charcoal.

Those subtle clues and Michaels' paintings were the only evidence Saturday that the dirty job of iron making once took place at the site. Across the street, a water wheel on the Blackberry River and mechanical building provided power to run the bellows in furnace No. 3.

When it was shut down in 1923, it was the last of 43 furnaces in the Salisbury Iron District to go. It was the end of the Great Iron Age that produced cannons for George Washington's ships, train wheels (some still in use today) and products that revolutionized the nation.

It is always fascinating to try to imagine the river valley along Lower Road clouded in smoke from three furnaces and now-forested hills denuded for charcoal making. Folks who turned out for the annual Blackberry River Walk Saturday morning were a mix of newly curious and those who never tire of being transported back by tales, history and insight offered by Friends of the Beckley Furnace.

The Friends evolved from the Committee for the Preservation of Beckley Furnace, a local group that did just that, beginning in 1996 by convincing, with the help of legislators, the state Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) to secure a $250,000 grant for the work.

The 40-foot high chimney remains of the Beckley Furnace were crumbling and its unmortared marble stones were threatening to become a pile beyond restoration when the state bought it in the mid-1940s. Yet nothing more was done beyond designating it as a state Industrial Monument and placing it on the National Register of Historic Places.

Since the committee began working on the site, archaeology work under the furnace unearthed clues about its operation and a mystery that remains.

Water from the dammed Blackberry supplied power, first by water wheel and later turbine to the bellows that blasted air, making the charcoal fires hot enough to melt iron from ore. A separate series of pipes found under the furnace was not used for water, archaeologist Fred Warner said. "We think they may have drawn moist air from underneath. The worst thing for a blast furnace is for it to get wet."

Except for a furnace in Scotland, Beckley is the only furnace known to have this pipe system. Answers may surface when they begin the next step in their exploration, excavating the mechanicals that lie between the furnace and the dam.

As has become the tradition, the walk began with a brief introduction at North Canaan Congregational Church, where Dr. William Adam spoke briefly about the valley's "dark" past. He lives just down the road in the family home and is a descendant of furnace builder John Adam Beckley, and Samuel Forbes and John Adam Jr., founders of the Forbes & Adam Iron Co.

It is Dr. Adam's vineyards that are on the old furnace No. 3 site. The charcoal-laced soil produces a uniquely flavored grape, he says.

The walk was extended this year. First, a stop at the old paymaster's building above the dam reveals the latest changes at the site. The state purchased the property at the urging of the Friends and members are continuing to turn it into an educational center, hanging for exhibition this summer Michael's historic paintings of the ironworks, the Blackberry Dam and charcoal making. Recent news was of their archaeological look at a brick annex, an unusual room that once held the safe for the script the Barnum and Richardson Co. used to pay its ironworkers. That a heavy steel door guarded the room was no secret. Tracks in the floor and a mangled door frame are evidence, but who would tackle moving the door and why?

Tony Cantele, a former resident of the converted paymaster's office said he was fairly sure he has discovered the location of the door, or at least narrowed it down to his uncle's farm in Claverack, N.Y. "I recalled a cattle trough at the farm that was similar to the shape of the door," Cantele said. "My mom and dad said it came from Canaan, and by Canaan, they meant this house. They must have moved it, but I can't imagine how. That was a very heavy door."

Unfortunately, the door was at some point buried in a cleanup at the farm, surely with a lot of other junk, Cantele said. It will be difficult to recover, but he sorely wants to try.

Walkers, and those who chose a ride in Adam's tractor-drawn wagon, were invited beyond Beckley Furnace to the No. 3 site, where Michaels waited to talk about the last operating furnace, whose operation was last overseen by his French grandfather, Alfred Predrizet.

Michaels displayed prints of his work and on a grapevine post hung a painting of the furnace that once dominated the field. He pulled out an old black and white photograph, taken by his mother, Julia Michaels, the only known photo of that furnace to exist.

An air pipe spanned Lower Road. Michaels recalls his grandmother saying horses always balked and had to be urged under it. "I think it was because they weren't sure what it was. It wasn't like a tree branch or something they were used to gauging the height of and they thought they were going to hit their heads on it."

His cousin Bobby Predrizet came up from Bethel for the walk. He spent summers at their grandparents' home across from the Beckley site and joined the group with his own colorful stories. The cousins described a wooden bridge that both feared to cross as boys. It was very high with wooden ties, suggesting trains once used it, probably bringing charcoal from where it was made on the mountain and most likely bringing slag, those colorful rocks that are a byproduct of iron making, back across to be dumped.

They crossed the bridge to pick blackberries as boys. "You brought along a stick, a tourniquet and a razor blade," Predrizet said. The forest had not yet regrown and he remembered Canaan Mountain as brush-covered, the ideal environment for deer, berries and snakes, often rattlesnakes. His grandmother could be counted on to come to their defense.

"My grandfather used to tell me these stories about how he tied a feed bag around his waist and let the rattlesnakes strike it and he'd catch them inside. Then he would butcher and eat them," he said. "For two or three years I was pretty impressed. Then one day we came home from picking blackberries and grandma was carrying the rattlesnake she had killed. Grandpa wouldn't go anywhere near it."

With pictures from the past revived in his head, Predrizet looked around at the now tranquil setting and summed it up with, "Yep, an awful lot happened around here."