Essex Horse Nail Company and Wadhams Mills

I spied this intriguing artifact in an eBay auction. It’s a canceled envelope for a letter, invoice, something… sent from the Essex Horse Nail Co., Limited in Essex, New York on August 16, 1898 (year cited in eBay auction, though I’m unable to verify) to Mr. D. J. Payne in Wadhams Mills, New York. It’s a somewhat unremarkable artifact, detritus really, the “wrapper” from correspondence between the village where I live now and the village where I grew up, from the village where the Essex Horse Nail Co. no longer stands (and Rosslyn still does), to the village where “Homeport” still presides over the Boquet River just upstream from a hydroelectric power plant (resurrected on the site of the original Wadhams Mill). Unremarkable, yes, and yet nostalgic. A bridge across almost twelve decades, a dusty handshake between two geographically poignant reference points in my personal journey. Nothing more. Nothing less.