For fifty years I’ve lived near two rivers in Connecticut, the Thames and the Mystic. From both dwellings I could see just a wedge of water but it was enough to allow my mind to wander, contemplating all the history that evolved along their tidal edges. In 2020, the first year of the pandemic, I borrowed from the local library a book about mudlarking on London’s river Thames. A mudlarker is a British term referring to a person searching a river at low tide for discarded or lost items. Iron, coal, old coins or maybe rope might be found and sold for a little money. A more contemporary definition would include rummaging the mud for items that have historic or cultural merit as well as monetary value. Of course, in England, on the Thames, those findings could reveal centuries upon centuries of human occupation from Celtic and Roman to modern day. In this little New England town my mudlarking goal is not to find the missing gold ring or ancient coin, but to gather items which reveal something about where I live. My mud treasures have given me insight about former residents of this working class area, their occupations and popular consumables. 

Since the pandemic closed the library, I could turn the pages and read about mudlarking many times without the threat of overdue fines. The Mystic River was just down the hill so I too could become a mudlarker and that is just what I did. Looking at a fisherman’s tide chart on the kitchen wall, I headed for the Mystic during the best low tides. My findings were mundane, curious and historic in a twisted kind of way. Painting watercolors of shards and objects brought together little stories. Photographs of the arranged pieces formed a new reality. I slowly attained a better insight regarding the people who lived and worked in the textile factory village of Greenmanville, a section of Mystic, Connecticut during the beginning, middle and end of the 20^th Century.

Here is a little visual story brought to you through fragments of pottery, glass, wire, plastic and metal discovered in the Mystic River mud.

To mudlarkers, obsessive collectors and local history gatherers, Ivor Noël Hume (All the Best Rubbish), Lara Maiklen (Mudlark: In Search of London’s Past Along the River Thames)  and most of all Rudy Favretti (Jumping the Puddle: Zoldani to America), a big Thank You .