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M. L.
GENEALOGY COLLECTION
ALLEN COUNTY PUBLIC LIBRARY 3 1833 01149 1484
NAUGATUCK IN THE 1860's LOOKING WEST
....
History of NAUGATUCK Connecticut
BY Constance McL. Green
DIRECTOR OF RESEARCH SMITH COLLEGE COUNCIL OF INDUSTRIAL STUDIES
NEW HAVEN Yale University Press
LONDON · GEOFFREY CUMBERLEGE · OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright, 1948, by Constance McL. Green Printed in the United States of America
First published, December, 1948 Second printing, June, 1949
Cammer= 3.00
CONTENTS
List of Illustrations iv
Preface V
I Naugatuck in 1944 1135837 1
PART I - THE ERA OF THE FARMER
II The Founding of Waterbury 9
III The Settlement of Judd's Meadows 19
PART II - THE DAY OF YANKEE NOTIONS
IV The Salem Society 37
V The Emergence of the Small Shops 49
VI Every-day Life in Salem Bridge, 1800-1844 71
PART III - NAUGATUCK AS A TOWN, 1844-1893
VII Public Affairs and Private Life 93
VIII From Shop to Factory 123
PART IV -NAUGATUCK THE BOROUGH, 1893-1944
IX Borough Government and the Community 151
X Industrial Expansion, 1893-1921 188
XI The Growth of the Corporations, 1921-1940 213
XII The Impact of War 232
NOTES ON OLD HOUSES
254
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
256
APPENDIX I
260
APPENDIX II
261
APPENDIX III 262
APPENDIX IV 267
INDEX 269
iii
ILLUSTRATIONS
Naugatuck in the 1860's, Looking West Frontispiece Sketch Map Showing Location of Settlers of Judd's Meadows 25 Sketch Map of School House Sites According to William Ward's Locations 83
PREFACE
EVERY American town or city has many features common to communities of the region where it lies. Each possesses some general characteristics that stem from geographical location, from a common heritage, and from settlement by peoples of similar racial stocks. So in some degree every town history is national history reflecting trends of each period of the nation's past. On the other hand, every community also has unique quali- ties born of events peculiar to itself, influenced by personalities differing sharply or slightly from those who gave a turn to the history of a neighboring town.
Few towns display more perfectly than Naugatuck, Connecti- cut, this duality of the usual and the unusual. Unequipped with knowledge of Naugatuck's development, a traveler might drive through the borough along the river heading south from noisy, outspreading Waterbury toward Seymour, Ansonia, and Bridge- port on Long Island Sound, without realizing that Naugatuck is like these other cities but at the same time enormously dif- ferent. He might see only another New England manufacturing city, combining with the vigor of any place that produces articles for human use the visible disharmonies of factories and shops in a community dedicated to making material things; a rather drab spot where the natural beauty of the surroundings has been lost in man-made ugliness. But seen with an understanding of the struggle which the emergence of the modern borough typifies, and with some comprehension of the vagaries of fortune that made Naugatuck the first rubber town of America and that have kept it in the forefront of scientific manufacturing, the ugliness is transformed, or takes on a fascination of its own. What pre- vented this little valley town set among the western Connecticut hills from duplicating the uneventful career of the towns of the Housatonic valley just over the mountains to the west? Can one
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HISTORY OF NAUGATUCK
believe that in casting off the role of the simple agricultural vil- lage Naugatuck plunged into a life laden with griefs and frustra- tions which could have been evaded? Wherein does this city, even today having less than seventeen thousand inhabitants, dis- tinguish itself from other New England mill towns? What gives it peculiar flavor? Because one may find the answers to such ques- tions, the history of another New England town becomes justified.
No other section of the United States is so well supplied with local histories as New England. Though they frequently serve as sources for odd bits of lore that, pieced together, contribute specific information to a larger, more significant story, the stu- dent of modern America finds most New England town histories dreary reading. In writing this chronicle I have attempted con- stantly to present against the background of the universal the distinctive features that make Naugatuck. Not all citizens of the borough will agree with my selection of material. I have included many paragraphs describing conditions that are duplicated in virtually every industrial community in America. Whether com- mendable or deplorable, they constitute, I believe, an essential part of the story, a part without which the whole has little mean- ing. One reader may find too much space allotted to discussion of labor-management relations in Naugatuck's factories; another may consider the descriptions of manufacturing processes inade- quate. Perhaps many people will be disappointed at omission of much anecdotal detail about individuals, living and dead. The responsibility for inclusion or omission of known data and, per- force, therefore some interpretation of what is known, is wholly mine. The facts themselves, "stubborn and irreducible," in Wil- liam James's phrase, have been beyond my control.
One distinction is Naugatuck's which cannot be over- emphasized: the courage of the townspeople in wishing to have the truth about their town told. Every hamlet, every metropolis in America has seen its past and its present develop situations of which it can not be wholly proud. The temptation to conceal or
vi
PREFACE
even to deny them is human. But Naugatuck with wisdom and vision has rejected half-truths. Though the borough is revealed as far from faultless, the willingness of its citizens to admit their weaknesses and to submit to analysis the origins of their short- comings is as admirable as it is rare.
To the Board of Directors of the Chamber of Commerce who sponsored the preparation of this volume, special acknowledg- ment is due. Their interest in the undertaking has given me both material and moral support. Members of the History Committee of the Naugatuck Chamber of Commerce, W. M. Chittenden, Chairman, E. M. Barnum, H. P. Baldwin, W. E. Bittle, Emily Sophie Brown, H. L. Carter, H. E. Chittenden, Jessie F. De- Shong, L. A. Dibble, Rev. G. F. Dunn, Helen G. Moroney, Irene L. Squires, C. B. Tuttle, D. S. Tuttle, and H. Whittemore, Jr., have given time and effort to make this history accurate and fair. My debt to the subcommittee of townspeople, Miss Jessie F. De- Shong, Librarian of the Howard Whittemore Memorial Library, who painstakingly assembled obscure letters and diaries, Miss Helen G. Moroney, Principal of the Salem School, who checked especially all data relating to the school system, and Miss Emily Sophie Brown, all of whom have contributed generously of their time and special knowledge, and particularly to its chairman, Mr. Earl M. Barnum, is greatest of all. Miss Irene L. Squires, Secretary of the Chamber of Commerce and member of the com- mittee, has also been very helpful. Without their patient col- laboration many sources of fact would not have been available, and their assistance in interpretation of materials has been invalu- able. The collecting of the local photographs which illustrate this volume is wholly the work of this subcommittee.
It is therefore with the utmost appreciation of the distin- guished quality of its citizens that I offer this book to Naugatuck.
CONSTANCE MCL. GREEN
December 1946 Northampton, Massachusetts
vii
CHAPTER I
Naugatuck in 1944
T HE stranger arriving in the borough of Naugatuck in the 1940's sees few vestiges of an old New England town. The rock-strewn river, in a thin milky flow, wanders past mills and mill yards; the railroad tracks skirt the banks; and the steep hills, plunging down toward the brick strongholds and tall chimneys of the town's industries, are dotted with frame houses of indeterminate age. Great trees conceal the pleasant, modern homes of the well-to-do. A few three- or four-story office buildings, a single apartment house, and a row of unpretentious ten-footers line the main streets, one on the left bank, one on the right bank of the river which bisects the town. Apart from the "green," created in the nineteenth century to serve as a focus for the two churches, the school, and the Town Hall and the library built later, there is little to indicate that Naugatuck lies in Connecticut, rather than in Ohio or even Oregon. The win- dows of the A & P and First National stores, of the chain dime stores, of the corner drugstores with their cigarette posters and toothpaste displays, might look out on the shop- pers of Ware or Great Barrington, of Bristol or Putnam, or of any other ancient American village transformed by the machine age into a manufacturing town.
Perhaps the nature of the terrain, the gulch-like valley with only meager stretches of level land at the river, ac- counts for the ruthlessness with which the industrial present has eradicated the signs of the past. To the valley of the Naugatuck, wealthy retired sea captains and rich merchants were not attracted as they were to the hill-top towns of western Connecticut or to the wide spaces of localities like Norwich. The conservative and domineering influence of a
1
HISTORY OF NAUGATUCK
few powerful, aristocratic families found no enduring place here. Of practically equal age with Middlebury, Woodbury, and Watertown, and even older than Litchfield, towns which still display their seventeenth and eighteenth century origins at every turn, Naugatuck, in emerging from over a century of farming into an era of manufacturing, destroyed the old to make place for the new. There was not room for both.
In the "Deacon's Meadow" of the seventeenth century, just north of the present bridge on the west side of the river, rise today mills of the United States Rubber Company. West on Rubber Avenue, in a building where in the nineteenth century hosiery and woolens were knit and woven, the Lewis Engineering Company turns out its precision instruments, while nearby the Risdon Company manufactures its machine parts and metal goods. Further downstream stand the build- ings of what began one hundred years ago as The Goodyear's Metallic Rubber Shoe Company, the first rubber shoe fac- tory in the world. And below these, punctuating the skyline with its great black iron funnels, is the rubber reclaiming plant fed from the huge piles of old automobile tires that fill the mill yards. From the Indian "canoe place" of the 1670's up and down the river for half a mile the heaps of greyblack tires, dumped behind wire fencing, line the bank, compelling the eye in their ugliness and yet provoking the imagination as well. Adjacent are the laboratories of the rubber chemical plant. Still further south rises the new synthetic rubber mill flanked by huge gleaming spheres for storing butadiene and a great "burning stack." Beyond here mill yards and streets give way to plots speckled with small frame houses set among a few old apple trees, until the town drifts off into open country, broken by the hills that close off the community at the narrows of the river, at the Straits.
To the west of these areas built up by industry along the river, a long ridge stretches northward, the "Great Hill" of seventeenth century grants, upon which the business leaders of our day have built their homes to look out over the nar-
2
NAUGATUCK IN 1944
row valley, over the chimneys and factories which sustain the town. At the north of the heights Hop brook swings down into the Naugatuck river past the unobtrusive build- ings of the Eastern Malleable Iron Company works. Hop brook alone of all the five mountain streams that launched Naugatuck upon its industrial career one hundred years ago rushes today with a volume of water large enough to hint of the power that once turned water wheels for shops along all the streams. Beyond the cliff the land included in the town- ship falls off into open meadows where small homes still house families who work in the factories in the center. Still further west, up along the charming stretches of Long Meadow brook, clustered around the tiny falls at Millville, a small settlement survives. Higher up the valley, running up the hills that mark the boundaries of Middlebury and Oxford, remnants of eighteenth century Gunntown stand in the form of a few old farmhouses, and of the Gunntown burial yard with its score of beautifully carved gravestones marking the extinction of the half dozen families who dominated the life of Gunntown one hundred fifty years ago.
East of the river still less remains of a simpler, dignified past. At the northern extremity of the town, where in mid- nineteenth century Union City grew up at the mouth of Fulling Mill brook, small stores and gas stations line the Waterbury turnpike. Along this broad concrete highway great motor buses, bound for Waterbury to the north or New Haven to the south and east, rush by, crossing the culvert that carries Fulling Mill brook to the Naugatuck river almost un- perceived. Fulling Mill brook itself trickles down alongside the road mounting to the town of Prospect, and only vivid im- agination, fed by an occasional glimpse of stone abutments of dams and shops long since vanished, permits of a mental pic- ture of the Yankee community of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Fulling Mill brook's ten or more water powers that created the Yankee notions for which the region was noted have dwindled into nothingness, their sites over-
3
HISTORY OF NAUGATUCK
grown with trees and brush or built up with small houses tenanted by second generation Lithuanians and Poles. The second oldest house in Naugatuck today, the Thomas Porter homestead built about 1752, stands not far from the mouth of the brook, so surrounded by humble houses and their ad- joining sheds and hen yards that it is difficult to view the harmonious proportions of the pleasant old dwelling. Only at the very mouth of the brook, at its convergence with the river, does one plain frame factory building still stand. Just beyond rise the red bricks and golden cross of St. Mary's Roman Catholic Church.
Still further south, beyond the bridge which links the eastern half of the town with the west bank, stores give way to wooden tenements which rise up the hillside in piazzaed tiers to make "Little Italy." As the road to Bethany and New Haven mounts the plateau to swing eastward away from the river, one comes upon a modern factory, set off by well kept lawns, home of Peter Paul, the candy company.
Not until one approaches Beacon Hill brook, south at the edge of Bethany, or turns down from the New Haven Road toward the river, may one see in Straitsville some evidences of the past. On one side of the road, shaded by great elms, is a handsome, old, pillared house, the tavern of 1811. Depredations of time and circumstance which con- verted the gracious inn into a six-family tenement have not succeeded in destroying its beauty of line. The days when Straitsville, as a coach-road stop between New Haven and Litchfield, boasted a post office, a thriving country store, a malleable iron foundry, and several clock shops located along Beacon Hill brook, are not hard to conjure up. Along the lower reaches of the brook once stood a cotton mill that gave its name to Cotton Hollow. On the ruins of the old factory are today a few dwellings, and small farms occupy the triangle between the brook, the river, and the New Haven road. Yet, while only Collins "Hotel" visibly ties the past to the
4
NAUGATUCK IN 1944
present, more flavor of time gone-by surrounds Straitsville than other parts of Naugatuck.
The factory town of 1944, a center of rubber manufacture and chemical research, of malleable iron manufacture, the source of various important lines of metal wares, and the home of famous packaged candies, is thus a factory town, not a sleepy and beautiful New England village. Few of its lead- ing citizens today are natives to Naugatuck; still fewer stem from Yankee families. Over half of its 17,000 inhabitants are by extraction Irish, German, Swedish, Italian, or Polish. No nostalgic viewing of the past can reconvert the hill- hemmed manufacturing town into a sedate community dominated by old families and Puritan tradition, however modified. Roman Catholic and Swedish Lutheran congrega- tions dispute the supremacy of Congregational and Anglican influences. And in politics the Democratic party affiliations of the newcomers have largely submerged the power of "staunch" old Republicans.
Fortunately few citizens of Naugatuck devote energy to mourning for the unreturnable past. Aware of the possibili- ties of the future, they waste scant time in futile regrets that so little of the gracious outer aspects of eighteenth and nine- teenth century New England has been preserved in the borough. Fewer prejudices against new nationality groups obtain; less depressing pseudo-superiority of Yankee over Irish, Swede, Italian, or Pole exists than can be found in most American manufacturing cities. It seems probable that this refreshing generosity of attitude grows out of the temper of the town in earlier days when nearly every substantial householder ran his shop as well as his farm and, from ex- perience born of working at a skill with his own hands, learned to respect the honest work of any craftsman. If so, despite the loss of the outward material things, the inner spirit of the old New England town has been preserved.
5
PART I The Era of the Farmer
CHAPTER II
The Founding of Waterbury
I N 1673 western Connecticut inland from Long Island sound was still a wilderness; only trappers and hardy adventurers in the colony had explored it somewhat. The first interest in the region around the river which came to be called the Naugatuck had grown out of the discovery of a hill thought to contain black lead, and in 1657 two men of Farmington acquired from the Indians mining rights in a tract of land called "Matetacoke" including the hill from which the lead came. Although the lead deposit proved non- existent, some sixteen years later the richness of the land at the intervales of the river, by then better known, inspired men of Farmington to seek rights to settle there. The place called "Matetacoke" or "Mattatuck" lay twenty miles west of the settlement at Farmington, twenty miles of pathless forest, most of it still an Indian hunting ground. Stretches along the river itself were favorite Indian fishing sites. But open meadows such as lined the river for several miles above the narrows were highly desirable, and in the fall of 1673 twenty-six men of Farmington petitioned the General Court of the colony of Connecticut to sanction the planting of a new settlement there. At this point the history of Naugatuck begins; for Naugatuck for over one hundred and seventy years was part of Waterbury.
For such a venture as settling a new locality the necessity of official approval of the Governor and General Assembly of the colony was recognized. For although Hartford and other Connecticut river towns, New Haven, and settle- ments along the coast were firmly rooted, no Englishman could fail to acknowledge the hazards of undertaking a new plantation far removed from the established communities.
9
HISTORY OF NAUGATUCK
After 1663, without approval of the General Court, no in- dividual might purchase from the Indians any land within the limits of the jurisdiction of the colony, a jurisdiction which the royal charter proclaimed as extending to the western ocean. The thinly peopled little colony could not afford to risk unduly the lives of any settlers. And, in ac- cordance with Puritan principles, that new towns to rise might be grounded in Christian faith, only sites capable of sustaining a sufficient number of families to provide for a minister of the Gospel could be approved. The procedure, therefore, was to appoint a committee of the General Court to consider the reasonableness of the petition and to investi- gate the suitability of the site.
The twenty-six petitioners for the privilege of settling Mattatuck, as Waterbury was first called, were mostly young men. Inasmuch as Farmington itself in 1673 had only eighty- four families to occupy its great township, the plea of the petitioners, "being sensible of our great need of a comfort- able subsistence," can scarcely be interpreted today as spring- ing from land hunger. There is reason to believe that each of the petitioners had his own house in Farmington and was not in straightened circumstances. Rather we must conclude that the signers of the petition were seeking freedom from the restrictions of the older settlement and opportunity to hold positions of honor in a new. Whatever their reasons, their appeal was promptly acted upon, and the General Court immediately appointed a Committee of five to view the proposed location. In the spring of 1674 the Committee reported the place capable of accommodating thirty families, the number necessary to support a minister, and the court appointed a Grand Committee to supervise the administra- tion of the new plantation.
In 1674, therefore, thirty-nine men of Farmington en- tered into articles of agreement, indicating each the extent of his financial responsibility in the enterprise by an entry opposite his signature. One hundred pounds was the largest
10
FOUNDING OF WATERBURY
sum listed, fifty pounds the least. The exact workings of such proprietors' agreements, their relationship to the colony, and the financial dealings of one proprietor with another are hard to understand. The purchase from the Indians of title to the soil at Mattatuck was made by the Grand Committee in 1674 for a sum of thirty-eight pounds, which the proprietors three years later duly repaid to the Committee. We must guess that each of the proprietors paid his proportion of this and other expenses, the man with a hundred pound propriety paying twice the amount paid by the man listed as having fifty pounds in the undertaking. There is, however, no record to indicate that each pro- prietor was actually called upon for support in any exact relation to the amount entered by his name in the articles of agreement.
These articles of agreement, whereby each signer became a participant in the undertaking, were specific about both privileges and obligations. Every person accepted as an in- habitant of the plantation was to receive eight acres as a home lot. But the meadow lands which constituted the main wealth of the projected community were to be apportioned to each signer according to his estate as entered opposite his name, in other words, according to his financial commit- ment. No proprietor was to have more than a hundred pound interest. For the first five years the taxes for public expenses were to be charged to each proprietor in proportion to his holdings of meadowland, and thereafter the rates were to be on polls and estates in conformity with the law of the colony. The obligations to be met were equally clear. Every person accepting an allotment must within four years build a substantial house, he must personally dwell as an inhabi- tant of Mattatuck, and he must maintain his residence there for four years. Otherwise he forfeited all rights and titles in the land, and the Committee might dispose of his allot- ments to persons ready to comply with the conditions stipu- lated.
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HISTORY OF NAUGATUCK
In the summer of 1674 some of the new proprietors set out over the twenty-mile trail from Farmington to the chosen site on the Naugatuck river to begin the task of lay- ing out the settlement. But the time was ill-chosen. The fol- lowing summer kindled to flame the simmering hostility of the powerful Narraganset Confederation of Indians, and the outbreak of the bloody King Philip's war exposed out- lying settlements all through New England to overwhelm- ing danger. By October the General Court of Connecticut or- dered planters in remote localities to withdraw to defendable places and, in consequence, most of the men at Mattatuck probably returned to Farmington, leaving only a few men to harvest the crops grown in that summer of 1675 and to transport the corn to Wallingford for safe-keeping. So dis- couraged were some of the original proprietors that, when in 1677 it was thought safe to resume the settling of Matta- tuck, a number abandoned the enterprise. The last or- ganized Indian attacks, those against Hatfield and Deerfield in Massachusetts, and the last requisition of Connecticut troops to defend the white colonists occurred in September 1677, but the fear of sporadic Indian raids deterred even hardy men from removing their families into the wilderness on the Naugatuck.
So the plantation had to begin again. New signers of the articles of agreement assumed the responsibilities of those who withdrew and the Committee for Mattatuck extended by a year the time limit originally set within which the pro- prietors must take up residence in the new community. "Absenteeism" was not to be countenanced. Any man un- willing to face the hazards of moving his family to Mattatuck and taking his full share of the burden of developing the settlement forfeited his proprietor's rights. By November 1679 most of the subscribers had lived up to the conditions of building houses and establishing their households here. But a few had delayed. Against these latter the actual dwellers in Mattatuck three years later appealed to the Grand Com-
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