Classes and Sawmills

The ceremony was held in the shadow of the sawmill, red chipping boards a quaint backdrop to an atypical St. Lawrence Saturday scene. But I wasn’t at St. Lawrence last Saturday. No, three classmates and I passed up some first-weekend-back revelry to visit the Croghan Island Mill. Because sawmills are exciting, right? Well, that, and inspiring, as an even more inspiring St. Lawrence professor taught her Environmental Studies class last fall.

Serious machinery inside the Croghan Mill

Professor Amanda Lavigne’s Energy and the Environment class isn’t that unusual at St. Lawrence. Students take classes with service components every semester, building on SLU’s commitment to experiential learning and our awesome North Country community. First-Year Programs travel to the Akwesasne Mohawk Reservation to work with and learn from the Native American community in our own backyard. English students visit local prisons to learn from and with the incarcerated. Global Studies classes journey to the US/Mexico border every Spring Break, learning firsthand about human migration and border control. 

Watching, in awe, at the Akwesasne Mohawk International Pow Wow

All these classes are challenging, as much for their course content as the experiences they not always painlessly instill. But Amanda Lavigne’s class took “challenge” to the next level. Amanda challenged her students to save the Croghan Dam, a 130-year-old dam and sawmill serving as the backbone to the small town of Croghan, New York. The students saved the dam, for now, learning along the way the art and heartbreak of fundraising, grassroots campaigning, grant writing, lobbying, sweet-talking and not giving up. The ceremony I attended celebrated the Mill’s placement on the TAUNY Very Special Places list, a symbolic victory that followed the award of a $100,000 USDA grant to fund research into the hydroelectric capabilities of the Croghan Dam.

A SLU student, Mike Petroni, is thanked by Croghan community members at the ceremony for his work to save the mill. All admire their new TAUNY Very Special Places plaque

I’m psyched for my classes this semester: some screenwriting, some analytical reading, some International Political Economy. But I’m even more psyched that a class, taught a year ago this semester, could inspire St. Lawrence students to leave our cozy SLU bubble and attack a problem affecting our community. SLU students use our fresh, positive energy to work and change and save right here in the North Country, every semester and every day.

Tutoring the most adorable third-graders at Canton Elementary last year

We may not live in Princeton, nor spend weekends sailing the Charles. But St. Lawrence students jump into our community as comfortably on the back of a snowboard as behind a rototill. We love where we are, and we love what we do.

“I hope to hear the rumble of that water wheel rolling again,” a local man named Wendell confided in me as I stood watching the ceremony last weekend. My International Political Economy class might teach that specialization is efficiency; that local businesses like Croghan are doomed to fail. St. Lawrence students hear this rumble, but we don’t sit back and watch the movie unfold. We throw the TV’s from our dorm rooms and write that movie ourselves.  

A print of the Croghan Island Mill

For more information visit the mill's Facebook page: the Croghan Dam Restoration Initative for Local Business and Renewable Energy.