What the Water Remembers

The Great Falls and its industrial setting

What the “Water Remembers” is a photo essay centered on a visit to the Great Falls of the Passaic River and the surviving mill buildings of Paterson, New Jersey, in the United States. Prompted by an encounter with a textile lantern slide at the University of Connecticut’s Archives & Special Collections, I visited Paterson’s Great Falls and surviving mill buildings, bringing photographs of this post-industrial landscape into conversation with an archival stereograph of silk workers to explore how mill labor and industrialization shaped workers’ lives, communities, and the river’s ecosystem. It connects this history to contemporary debates about AI’s energy and water demands, inviting reflection on how technological change depends on both human labor and natural resources.

Workers in the archive

Reeling and lacing silk, peparing seins for weaver or dyer, Silk throwing plant, N.J.

My inquiry began in Archives & Special Collections at the University of Connecticut, with a lantern slide from a collection documenting textile sites worldwide. It showed women inspecting silk in a mill in Paterson, New Jersey, in the northeastern United States. I wanted to look beyond the fabric to the people who made it. This related stereograph shows workers preparing skeins for weaving or dyeing. Their hands hold our attention, but their names and individual stories are absent from the image’s title. The photograph preserves their presence without telling us who they were or what their lives were like. I began to wonder: what did mill work make possible, what did it demand of the people who performed it, and how did it change the river that powered it? I went to Paterson carrying those questions.

Names carved into buildings

Union Works facade, Paterson.

At Union Works, a former mill factory, the lettering appears above the street. A building’s name can endure while workers’ names slip from public memory. The inscription carries an irony: in 1913, Paterson silk workers, supported by the Industrial Workers of the World, struck for an eight-hour day. The strike failed, but their demand reminds us that workers sought time for lives beyond the mill. Although I have not connected this building to those strikers or to the workers in the stereograph, placing the images together invites us to consider what brick preserves and what it cannot. These walls oƬer a starting point. Remembering asks us to go further.

The Falls as infrastructure

The Great Falls of the Passaic River.

At the Great Falls, the Passaic River commands attention. Water Ʈlls the view, giving the mill landscape a movement and force that no surviving wall can convey. Long before the factories, the river was here; its history exceeds the uses people found for it. Paterson’s raceways diverted water to power machinery, drawing the river into the daily rhythms of production. Looking from the falls back to the stereograph, I began to see water and workers’ hands as parts of one history. To honor this place is to attend to both: the living river and the people whose labor helped make Paterson.

Water and the landscape

Pipe and bolted joint near te location identified by park signage as the original pipeline route.

A large pipe interrupts the greenery. Its bolted joint draws the eye to the eƬort of Ʈtting separate pieces together to create a structure that could contain and direct water. Nearby signage places this view within the history of the original pipeline. Here, engineering becomes something tangible, with seams and fastenings we can inspect. It also invites us to imagine the work of construction and maintenance, although the photograph cannot name those who performed it. The waterfall readily earns our admiration. This quieter detail asks for some of that attention too, and for respect toward the river people worked to channel.

Hydroelectric heritage

Hydroelectric building, river, and public landscap at te Great Falls.

Beside the falls, the hydroelectric building keeps the relationship between water and work in the present. Built between 1912 and 1914 and reopened with modern equipment in 1986, the powerhouse still generates electricity. Its historic walls contain continuing activity, much of it hidden from a visitor’s view. I Ʈnd that continuity compelling: the river ưows through a landscape where preservation and production meet. It also calls for care. How we use water matters alongside what it makes possible. Looking at this building, I want to recognize both the ingenuity of generations of workers and the river on which that ingenuity depends.

Materials left in the landscape

Vegetation framed by an opening in surviving masonry.

An opening in the masonry frames leaves beyond the wall. Stone, brick, and vegetation make a composition I was eager to photograph. Yet the stereograph unsettles the ease of admiring industrial remains. Once we have looked at workers’ faces and hands, an empty opening invites diƬerent questions. What might a working day have felt like here? Whose skill kept production moving? I cannot answer for this particular space from the photograph. I can let that uncertainty sharpen my attention. The beauty of the remains can draw us closer, then encourage us to seek the lives the walls no longer reveal.

Interpreting Silk City

The “Silk City” interpretive panel at the park.

The “Silk City” panel brings workers into the visitor’s path through photographs and words. It invites us into a history extending from Alexander Hamilton’s vision for an industrial city to Samuel Colt’s early Ʈrearms works and generations of textile production. Today, AI raises new questions about the energy and water data centers use. Human dependence on natural resources evolves with populations and technology, while rivers sustain life beyond industry’s demands. For me, the river symbolizes life itself. Behind Paterson’s celebrated inventions and silk were people whose stories deserve our curiosity. I encourage viewers to look further, giving those workers a lasting place in history.

Looking towards the city

A walking trail and view toward Paterson’s syline.

The trail leads toward downtown Paterson. Above the trees, a mill smokestack, rooftop solar panels, and distant residential towers bring diƬerent periods into view. People continue to make their lives here, beside the Passaic River. I end with an invitation to look again: at the falls, the buildings, and the workers whose faces survive in the stereograph. Remembering them opens our attention to mill workers around the world, whose labor also depended on rivers and whose stories deserve to be heard. It asks us to respect the importance and enduring presence of rivers, and to care for the people who still live and work beside them today.