The building where Joseph’s Waterworks was once located, in a later incarnation.
Q: When I moved to Vermont in 1985 there was a place on Route 5, right around the Norwich/Thetford line, called Joseph's Waterworks, where you could go listen to great music, have a meal and a beverage, and spend a wonderful evening. My husband and I saw people like Nanci Griffith and Aztec Two Step there. At some point that business closed down and since then the building has changed hands at least two or three times. For a while it was a cross-country ski store and rental place, and then it was a hostel for travelers. I'm not even sure what it is now. So my questions are:
Who was Joseph?
Is he still around and can he give you the history of Joseph's Waterworks? If not, is there anyone else who can give that history?
What caused the business to shut down? (I have missed it for decades.)
Who has been in that building since, and who is in the building now?
Thanks,
Robin Osborne
East Thetford
A: Joseph Stallsmith didn’t mean to name his new restaurant after himself when he opened it in the former Log Cabin Restaurant in Norwich in May of 1984.
“It wasn’t really an ego trip. We needed to change the name,” he said recently when I visited him at his rural Hanover home.
Joseph, who had co-opened Five Olde Nugget Alley in Hanover before selling his share, wanted to call the new joint just plain “Waterworks”. “Water” referenced the smorgasbord of seafood on the menu, the building’s views of the Connecticut River, and a callback to the ocean living he grew up with in greater Boston and Cape Cod. “Works” referenced the musical performances by heralded folk acts that would soon regularly max out the dance floor at around 100 people.
But when the school-teacher-turned-restaurateur realized the moniker was already taken elsewhere in Vermont, he threw his name in front. Joseph’s Waterworks was born, becoming well-known locally as a communal watering hole and the place to go for a night of food and music.
Joseph Stallsmith in a Waterworks hat. Photo courtesy of Joseph Stallsmith.
And in folk music circles, it earned a reputation as a well-paying and delightful place to play between destinations like Boston, Northampton, and Burlington. The better-known acts would come in with riders on their contracts, perhaps requesting special cheeses, beers, or other particulars. Joseph would tell them: “You can have anything you want.”
“They kept coming back,” Joseph recalled. “That was the cool thing, that they said, ‘This place is really unique.’”
Taj Mahal, The Gary Hubbard Band, Livingston Taylor, Doc Watson and Dr. Burma were among the acclaimed acts that passed through the 4,000-square-foot building on the outskirts of town. Joseph and Ingrid Stallsmith ran the operation five nights a week (except for when they closed it for a couple nights in October 1984 to get married). Joseph served as chef and booking agent, Ingrid designed menus in the form of fantastic fake newspapers and hand-written scripts, and with the help of a tight-knit community of local friends and staff, both of them did a little bit of everything in between.
The name of the game was fun. Among their signature dishes was a bouillabaisse dubbed the “Norwich hot tub.” In addition to other offerings, the fake-newspaper-menus included items like reviews from satisfied customers (including one from the Stallsmiths’ first son, submitted when he was an infant) and callouts to their friends, like an ad for the Chris Carroll School of Cooking (an homage to his friend who ran the Baited Hook in Enfield).
The front page of the first Waterworks newspaper, 1984. Photo by Maggie Cassidy.
“Oh my goodness,” Joseph said at his home, laughing as he pored over a manila folder of memorabilia. “Yeah, it's just dumb. It's a little dumb.”
Joseph, now 79, was a musician and self-described “folky” himself, getting hooked on the genre during his youth in Chelsea, Mass. He would travel to Club 47 in Cambridge to catch acts like Bonnie Raitt and Joan Baez. He learned guitar, banjo, ukulele and how to play the jug, which serves him well these days as one-third of The Occasional Jug Band.
He got his first dishwashing job at age 13 and went on to work in restaurants down the Cape and, in the winters, serving ski bums in New Hampshire. He worked for four years as a teacher in Arlington, MA, before moving to the Upper Valley and opening Five Olde, where he met Ingrid, a Dartmouth student.
For all the fun they had at Joseph’s Waterworks and the mark it made on a swath of Upper Valley residents, the restaurant lasted less than five years. Rebecca Bailey, who was reporting for the Valley News when the restaurant closed in 1988, started her story this way: “The biggest blow to pop and otherwise non-classical music locally was dealt by one guy who wanted to see more of his family.”
After the Stallsmiths had their second child, Joseph recalled, he couldn’t fathom continuing to get home at 2 o’clock in the morning. Around the same time, Vermont raised its drinking age from 18 to 21, matching New Hampshire’s and nullifying a big motivator for Dartmouth kids to travel across the border to Norwich, he said.
Bailey’s follow-up story about Waterworks’ final soiree was headlined “The Night the Music Died.”
“Joe’s has been several clubs rolled into one,” she wrote. “A local bar where you could play darts on Wednesday and carouse at ‘Open Mike’ on Thursday nights; a dance club where you could hear good local and regional bands on Friday and Saturday nights; and an intimate setting for concerts by such respected and nationally known folk, blues and pop performers as Rory Block, Greg Brown, Mose Allison, Dan Hicks, Tom Paxton, Nanci Griffin, Dave Bromberg and Dave Van Ronk.”
The Joseph’s Waterworks memorial T-shirt. Photo by Maggie Cassidy.
Joseph returned to education, serving as a Hanover High School guidance counselor for 20 years, and continued musical pursuits around the Upper Valley. The building changed hands a few times, serving as a church, a hostel, a cross-country ski and skate supply shop and a launching point for a bike tours business. I traded emails with the current owner, a Vermont Law School professor from China, who lives there and hosts Bible study for the local Chinese community.
Sure, it was sad to close Waterworks, Joseph said. But 40 years on, he and Ingrid can look back on it fondly — without having to scramble until the wee hours in the morning.
“It's a hard business,” he said. “Anyone that runs a folk club will tell you it's a labor of love.”
Ask Me
Finding Joseph and chatting with him was a real treat. If you’re wondering about the story behind another bygone business or local building — or if you have any type of Upper Valley curiosity — let me know! Email [email protected] with your name, town and question, or fill out this form.
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Maggie Cassidy is the former editor of the Valley News and managing editor of VTDigger. In addition to creative endeavors in film and other media, she is the marketing manager at KIS Clean Outs and KIS Thrift, and serves as the proprietor of Wilder’s largest salt and pepper shaker museum. She can be reached at [email protected].
