Three Rivers is more than the Birdsey family’s hometown: it is the place where immigrant ambition, Indigenous dispossession, industrial labor, and the twins’ intertwined lives meet. Its changing landscape carries the novel’s history—from a town whose growth coincided with the shrinking of Wequonnoc lands to a later regional economy reshaped by military industry and tribal development. For Dominick Birdsey, Three Rivers is also the ground from which he eventually looks back on his family and learns to understand its legacy differently.

Land, Town, and Indigenous History

The town’s origins are presented through a sharp contrast in how land and law distribute power. Three Rivers was incorporated in 1653 and grew steadily under white legal authority, while the Wequonnoc reservation diminished in acreage and its population dwindled. The contrast becomes visible beside the expansive grounds of Three Rivers State Hospital, where a modest Indian cemetery holds generations of graves. At its center stands a ten-foot pyramid of fist-sized rocks commemorating Samuel, the Great Sachem of the Wequonnoc Nation, whose seventeenth-century alliance with white settlers against neighboring nations is described as a grave mistake.

The cemetery’s older stones have become so worn and encrusted that reading them requires both sight and touch. Its graves include assimilated families as well as Wequonnoc veterans who served in the Civil War, the Spanish-American War, the World Wars, and Korea. The final stone, erected in the late 1960s, commemorates Lonnie Peck, the older cousin of Ralph Drinkwater, killed by sniper fire near Vinh Long in Vietnam in 1969. The cemetery therefore holds both the long duration of local history and the costs of successive national wars.

Work, Immigration, and Building a Home

Three Rivers is also shaped by its mills and the possibilities they offered newcomers. When Domenico Tempesta and his brothers arrived from Brooklyn, they found that wages at the mill were good, rents were inexpensive, and meals downtown cost less than in Brooklyn. The brothers were hired as dyers at Plant Number 2 of the American Woolen and Textile Company and rented a room in Signora Saveria Siragusa’s boardinghouse, paying a modest weekly sum after breakfast on Saturdays.

Domenico gradually turned mill wages and extra masonry and repair work into savings. He befriended Rosemark, an aging dairy farmer whose land on Hollyhock Hill was expected to become a development of half-acre city lots. When the town’s agreement with Rosemark’s widow set those lots for sale, Domenico had saved twelve hundred dollars and hoped to become the first Italian in Three Rivers to own land. The prospect of a home gave his work a purpose beyond wages: he was trying to secure a place for himself in a town where ownership marked both economic independence and social arrival.

His rise at the mill and his house-building were linked. By April 1916, Domenico had become the first Italian employee of the American Woolen and Textile Company to rise to boss dyer, and he moved into the two-apartment brick house he had built with his own hands. He rented one side to Salvatore Tusia’s family. Their rent was slightly below what Domenico had originally wanted, but the arrangement included haircuts and shaves; he made sure to collect a haircut every Friday. The domestic detail gives his achievement its particular character: even as he celebrated becoming a homeowner, he kept close account of what the household cost and returned.

The mill’s hierarchy could also expose the unevenness of that achievement. Domenico remembered that Pasquale Tempesta was fired after being made drunk at work and caught disrupting the dye room, while the man who had brought him whiskey was not dismissed. Domenico resented the injustice but believed he could not afford to sacrifice the chance to buy land for the sake of family honor. Pasquale found other work as a roofer, while Domenico continued toward homeownership. The town’s opportunities were real, but they came with choices shaped by money, status, and the power employers held over workers.

The Twins’ Town and Its Working Landscape

For Dominick and Thomas Birdsey, Three Rivers is the ordinary setting of childhood and adolescence: school, family rituals, work, and the nearby roads that connect the town to elsewhere. In June 1968, the twins graduated from John F. Kennedy High School and received a shared Royal typewriter from their mother, with duplicate keys attached to their graduation cards. The present belonged to both brothers, just as the machine’s locked case could be opened by either of them. Thomas typed a conventional test sentence; Dominick typed an insult about his brother, and their mother ended the joking with kisses. A small family scene thus gives the town’s high-school milestone a distinctive emblem of their closeness and rivalry.

The twins’ childhood also includes a school trip toward New York City, with the bus passing through Bridgeport on its way to the Statue of Liberty and Radio City Music Hall. Thomas is excited by the religious pageant he hopes to see at Radio City; Dominick is more interested in visiting another state and spending the money he earned through chores and helping Ray. That night, after reporting that the trip was boring, Dominick dreams of being trapped in a dark cave and discovering that the supposed cave is actually inside the Statue of Liberty. The trip makes Three Rivers a point of departure in both the practical sense of a journey and the more inward sense of a child’s imagination.

In the summer of 1969, after their first year of college, the brothers return to Three Rivers for seasonal work with the public works department. Their jobs include clearing brush at the reservoir, pumping the sump at the fairgrounds, and mowing town cemeteries, including the Indian cemetery. Dominick remembers them at nineteen as part of a quartet with Ralph Drinkwater and Leo. The town’s public spaces are not just scenery: the cemetery they mow places the young men beside the history of Native dispossession and military service, even as the work itself belongs to the routine labor of keeping a town functioning.

Class, Conflict, and Shared Spaces

The town’s social geography becomes especially clear in the contrast between the Birdseys’ home life and the Constantine family’s house in nearby Hewett City. When Dominick begins dating Dessa Constantine, he makes the sixteen-mile bicycle ride to her family’s large home, with its pool, tiled patio, flower gardens, marble-floored foyer, velvet furniture, and portraits. The rooms make him conscious of the relative smallness of his own family’s circumstances. Three Rivers is thus defined not only by the distance to neighboring places but by the class differences that become apparent across that distance.

Seasonal public-works jobs also bring workers together under the authority of Dell Weeks, whose drinking shifts between boozy friendliness and harassment. He uses racist insults toward Black workers and college men, and during one cruel drunken spell he gives Thomas a humiliating nickname. On other afternoons, Dell falls asleep in the shade or beside the city truck and tells the workers to leave him alone unless a supervisor appears. The crew’s workday offers room for their own talk and games, but it remains shaped by Dell’s power over the job and by the prejudice he brings into it.

Three Rivers becomes the setting for the consequences of that workplace association as well. After Leo and Dominick lie to state police about Ralph, a later newspaper report connects Dell and Ralph to a child-pornography investigation at the Weekses’ home. The house has been searched after an investigation that began with suspected drug trafficking; the police find photographs and films of minors, and a young resident of the home becomes a witness. Leo and Dominick recognize that they had worked alongside the men and been inside the house. The revelation turns a familiar local work circle into a source of shame and unease, and the town’s ordinary places acquire a darker retrospective meaning.

A Changing Region and a Reclaimed Future

In the novel’s later perspective, Three Rivers belongs to a region transformed by the contraction of military manufacturing and the growth of tribal gaming. Electric Boat, once an economic backbone of eastern Connecticut and the maker of nuclear submarines, has reduced its workforce to a fraction of its former size. The shipyard where Dominick and Thomas once witnessed the Nautilus launch is called the ghost yard. Against that decline, the Wequonnoc Moon Casino and Resort, opened in 1992, expands into a vast complex and becomes a major force in the regional economy. The narrator reports both the resort’s scale and the debate it attracts: it employs tens of thousands, while its supporters and detractors differ over what its growth means.

The former state-hospital grounds may also return to Wequonnoc use, since they were once part of the nation’s sacred hunting and fishing lands. Tribal officials and Connecticut’s governor are negotiating over the possibility. This potential reversal does not erase the cemetery’s history of shrinking land or the town’s earlier legal order; it places that history beside a possible change in who controls the ground.

Dominick’s own later life remains rooted in the area. He teaches American history at the Wequonnoc School, where he tries to teach a different understanding of power from the one he encountered in his own schooling. He connects that understanding to Domenico Tempesta’s failed effort to prove his greatness and to the humility with which Domenico eventually confronted his failures. Three Rivers, with its mill, cemetery, school, and altered economy, becomes more than a backdrop to Dominick’s past: it is the place from which he can teach and reconsider that past, including the histories of power that shaped both his family and the town.