PROFILE: Blackstone Valley taps RI filmmaker for series of videos

Park Cinema

A filmmaker and former ranger is helping Blackstone Valley share stories about its past and present

By Robert Isenberg

Guy Benoit has held many jobs, but none was more unexpected than park ranger. Benoit is an affable and quick-witted conversationalist, and you could picture him as a screenwriter, hustling in Hollywood for four years. He’s also a versatile copywriter, churning out sentences for a range of clients (including Providence Media). He could even pass for the dog-catcher or file clerk he once was. But a park ranger?

“I’m not an outdoorsy person,” Benoit confides. “I am a man of the great indoors.”

Yet, the role actually suited him well. The National Park Service (NPS) hired Benoit in 2011 to welcome visitors to the Captain Wilbur Kelly House, a Blackstone Valley State Park museum in Lincoln that stands along the park’s bike trail. Nestled among pre-locomotive canal routes, the museum’s primary theme is the history of transportation. But the Kelly House is also symbolic of the Industrial Revolution, green spaces, wildlife habitats, and centuries of Rhode Island heritage. As visitors popped in, Benoit would regale them with facts and anecdotes about the region.

“I was an emissary of good will to the bicyclists who passed by,” recalls Benoit, who manned the museum until 2015.

Then the NPS came up with another idea, which was even better suited to the veteran filmmaker: a series of informational videos, which would explore the history and significance of the Blackstone River Valley.

A Lincoln native, Benoit studied English at Providence College and spent several years on the road as a musician. He became interested in film and collaborated with the then-unknown thriller and horror director Brad Anderson, among others. Benoit moved to Los Angeles in 2000 to pursue a career

Ranger John McNiff chats with Ranger Andrew Schnetzer (right) over coffee while William Smyth checks the shot at Sylvanus Brown House at the Old Slater Mill Historic Site. Photos courtesy of Blackstone River Valley National Historical Park

in the movie industry, and he even sold a feature-length script, Dog Days, about his work as an animal control officer. The script was never produced, however, and despite his best efforts, Benoit didn’t see himself as a lifelong Angelino.

“LA’s all about the work,” he remembers. “The people you know are the people you work with. I don’t begrudge them, but I got very lonely.” Benoit returned to Rhode Island and started afresh.

Benoit never stopped writing, but the NPS video project was a bolstering opportunity. Spearheaded by supervisory ranger Kevin Klyberg, NPS approved the proposal for a new series of videos and offered Benoit a small budget. Instead of a traditional “Ken Burns”style documentary series, NPS has encouraged Benoit to experiment with the form.

“There’s this element of, ‘Let’s try something different,’” says Benoit, who has produced about a dozen videos in the past seven years. Each is unique: one is a traditional travelog; another mimics the free-form PBS talk shows of the 1970s; and a third – a Halloween short – is presented as a narrative story.

This diverse storytelling is in keeping with the YouTube account for the Blackstone River Valley National Historic Park, which mixes dozens of visual lectures and virtual tours. As Benoit quickly discovered, the story of this region is encyclopedic in scope, even for someone who grew up nearby.

“I had a big crash course at the beginning, and I’ve tried to pick stuff up as I go,” says Benoit. His appreciation for local terrain has grown exponentially in the decade he has spent celebrating it. “You have these collisions of big iron structures in pastoral environments. It really is like walking among Mayan ruins.”

Producing the videos has been a win-win for Benoit and the NPS. On the one hand, incalculable local viewers have learned about the ground beneath their feet. On the other, Benoit is a working filmmaker once more, far from the impersonal hubbub of Southern California.

“It’s Rhode Island, so you can’t make a living [as a screenwriter],” he says, “but you can get involved in something you care about.”

For the complete catalog of NPS videos, visit YouTube.com/c/BlackstoneNPS

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Home to Roost

A reclaimed shed turned apothecary brings a family business back to its bucolic beginnings

By Elyse Major

Lela and Brenda on Mitchells Lane, not far from Sweet Berry Farm

At the edge of a farm near the path to the raspberries is a small outbuilding. It’s an unassuming shack treated to fresh coats of white paint; the diagonal braces of its two wideopen doors, left natural, form a welcoming and rustic double Z. Sitting on a raised platform, humble chairs flank each side of the entrance, and a wavy tin overhang extends from the roof; the faint scent of lavender and citrusy bergamot entices from within. This idyllic cottage is the Farmaesthetics pop-up shop at Sweet Berry Farm in Middletown, and like this former tool shed turned apothecary, there’s more to this endeavor than meets the eye.

For the uninitiated, Farmaesthetics is a line of all-natural skincare made right here in Rhode Island with organically grown herbs and flowers. It was founded by Brenda Brock, now an acclaimed leader in sustainable beauty, then an actress on the soap opera One Life to Live, who spent her down-time mixing herbal formulas into soaps and lotions to show her young daughter Lela Barclay de Tolly that products “don’t grow on shelves.”

By the summer of 1999, Brock had enough inventory to sell her mixtures. The family, which includes husband Paul Barclay de Tolly, a noted furniture maker, relocated a 1920s pie stand from Charlestown to Wapping Road in Middletown as their first retail space. Lela was six years old. “She would help pack goodie bags,” Brock recounts. “Lela has been there every step of the way.”

Like her parents, Barclay de Tolly is artistically inclined. She graduated from RISD with a degree in furniture design and headed west where she worked in Los Angeles doing set design and props. When the pandemic hit, she suggested her mother shutter the Farmaesthetics flagship store in Newport, which had been on Bellevue Avenue for 13 years. “It was time for a fresh vision,” says Barclay de Tolly of the brand and, as it turns out, her own life. “The foothills were on fire, it was raining ash, and it was 100 degrees. Plus COVID. It was a lot and I wanted to be near family and the ocean.”

Barclay de Tolly returned to the Ocean State. Brock was thrilled and installed her daughter as the company’s first-ever art director. “It made perfect sense,” says Brock. “She knows the business inside and out.”

It was Barclay de Tolly who came up with the idea of the pop-up. “I knew immediately

Brenda, Lela and a cousin at the original farmstand in 1999

The former tool shed

THE FARMAESTHETICS POP-UP AT SWEET BERRY FARM

Thursday-Saturday, 11am-6pm Through October 31 915 Mitchell’s Lane, Middletown

I wanted to do it at Sweet Berry Farm given the parallels in the two entrepreneurs’ businesses, having both started at farm stands in 1999 on Wapping Road in Middletown,” she explains, referencing longtime friends and neighbors Jan and Michelle Eckhart, who own Sweet Berry, originally a hobby farm that has grown to a pickyour-own destination with a cafe and market.

The Farmaesthetics pop-up at Sweet Berry Farm would be Barclay de Tolly’s solo project. “Brenda has her fingerprint on everything,” says Barclay de Tolly. “She’s the formulator, designs the packaging. This was the first time she completely let go.” Brock confirms, “I didn’t even want to visit [the site] because I didn’t want to interfere with her vision.”

This vision started with taking a second look at a “really dirty” tool shed on the Sweet Berry Farm property. “I wanted to keep the pop-up sustainable and local, supporting local creators and artists.” For three months, Barclay de Tolly planned, researched, and did technical drawings. The porch was cleaned and built out, and electricity was put in; then, over the course of two weeks, it was painted and decorated. A sink, reclaimed from a Newport mansion that had been in the Bellevue shop, was installed, and furniture was sourced from thrift stores. Finally, shelves were lined with signature small-batch goods housed in frosted glass bottles, jars, or wrapped in luxe paper, with simple and effective labels, drawing on a font suite that resembles typewriting paired with cursive.

“I love the white walls with exposed beams,” Barclay de Tolly says with a sunny smile. “There’s a bright, fresh feeling with the rustic tones of the building. The dried and hanging lavender comes from my coworker’s garden, the ceramic bowls were made by a local potter, the sign was hand-painted in Providence, the tables were designed and built by my father, the paintings were my great grandmother’s. It was heartwarming being able to reimagine my mother’s original farm stand, creating a modern-day iteration of what her business has grown to be.”

And what does mom think? “It’s a new vision but the heart of the brand is the same,” says Brock. “High-end in a little shed. We’re going back to the farm.”