USA > Connecticut > New Haven County > New Haven > A modern history of New Haven and eastern New Haven County, Vol. I > Part 41
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AMERICAN MILLS COMPANY. CENTERVILLE
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ence in pavements or sidewalks catches his eye, and inquiring, he is told that he is in Highwood. And Highwood is a part of Hamden. Dixwell Avenue still runs on for three miles, and so, seemingly, does the city, on through what used to be ealled Ilamden Plains, but is now called a part of Highwood. A great manufacturing district has grown up here almost in the heart of Hamden, attracted by the presence of the Northampton or "Canal" tracks of the New Haven Railroad, now largely a freight line. It is the line of least resistance for the expansion of New Haven, and has a great future as a suburb.
To the northwest of this is a section of scattered farms, enelosing the "Northwest" or "Dunbar" school district, down on the official list as "No. 12." This takes in the wildest and least settled portion of the town, but it is a section interesting in its diversity, fascinating in its natural scenery. It is a region of farms, but much of it is still untamed woodland.
This takes in also the central northern section of the town, though that is naturally separated from it. This is a land of long distances, with high hills and rough country, woodlands and farms between. Here in these days farming takes mostly the form of raising milk for the nearby eity, and neighbors are far apart.
But leaving New Haven by another course, one finds himself, near its edge, in the city of the Winchester factories. Treading softly past them, for they are filled with high explosives in these days, he finds himself in another quarter of Hamden. This is Highwood. too, but on the east side of the railroad-between the railroad and the river. Here are smaller farms, market gardening plots, but mostly they are the suburban places of factory workers. This is a point midway between Hamden Plains and Whitneyville.
Or most likely the wayfarer reaches Hamden by following Whitney Avenue. One knows where this street begins, but is not sure where it ends. It is Whit- ney Avenue, surely, from the point where Church Street divides in New Haven. It goes on and on, past some of the finest of New Haven residences, past Lake Whitney, over the bridge, and on toward the open country. It is Whitney Avenue in Centerville. It surely is in Mount Carmel. They say it is in Cheshire. It may also be the road to Milldale.
But as soon as one leaves New Haven by this route he finds himself in one of the most interesting seetions of Hainden, another point where the city has overflowed. This is a pleasant suburban community by the lake, made up almost entirely, in these days, of the homes of New Haveners. Nevertheless, it has a somewhat distinct community life. There is no sign of factory activity except that in the very edge of the city. a little further on, as the trolley runs, there is a lively spot. A mile or a little more above the bridge, just before one enters Centerville, looms up the considerable factory of the American Mills Company, Hamden branch. And then comes Centerville.
This is not the center of the town. It really is on the far eastern edge of it. But it is the official "capital." so to speak, of the group of villages which make np Hamden. Here are the Town Hall and some stores and one of the principal
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churches. Here is an important crossroads. For this is the point where, after much wandering, Dixwell Avenue meets Whitney.
A mile and a half further on Mount Carmel begins. In effect, and seemingly by right, this is a town by itself. It has its center, too, which some eall Ives- ville, where there are the postoffice and some stores. The avenue proceeds placidly on, lined with some of the fine old houses which remind of Mount Carmel's early history, on past the mountain, and presently is lost in Cheshire.
Such is a glimpse of the Hamden of today. Many of its prominent char- acteristics are of recent growth. It is compact and homogeneous compared with the Hamden of twenty-five years ago. What must it have been, then, when 132 years ago Ilamden was carved ont of the tract of original "greater New Haven?" It did not include Mount Carmel, even then, but Mount Carmel, already established in a sort of independence, was for reasons of convenience annexed to the new town. It was named, we may suppose, from John Hamp- den. the English patriot. Its spelling was loyal to him for a time, but conven- ience triumphed over accuracy early in the town's history.
The lower part of Hamden was formed, doubtless, by that same overrunning from New Haven which is evident today. The New Haven colonists knew no town limits, however. It was in New Haven that they built their first dam across Mill River in 1686, though that was in what is now the territory of the Town of Hamden. It was not in New Haven that Eli Whitney established his famous factory, as a matter of strict geography, but in Hamden. Whitneyville, of course, was named from him, and the Whitney name was carried up through all the eastern side of the town. But in those days the Indians still roamed the western and northern portions of the town, and being peaceful Indians, they were permitted to dwell there for some time afterward. But the fine farming possibilities, even there, were too attractive to be missed, and the white man prevailed over all the town pretty soon after the opening of the nineteenth century.
Not only is the early development of the cotton gin and of firearms manu- facture in America traced to Hamden, but there were found the progenitors of another industry. Stephen Goodyear was one of the settlers of llamden, probably long before it was set off from New Haven. It was from his line that Charles Goodyear, who made the name forever identified with the rubber industry, came, though he did not come from Hamden. Daniel Gilbert was one of the early settlers in the southern portion of the town. Caleb and Abraham Alling were early identified with the upper part of that section called the "Plains," and the latter, though not a minister, acted as the first pastor of the Hamden East Plains, now the Whitneyville, church. From them came Hobart Alling of a later time, and his son Theodore. In that same section were the Benhams, whose descendants are still found in the western part of the town. The Warners must have early appeared in that seetion, and penetrated to the far northern and northwestern borders of the town, for now they are found there and in Highwood. Other families of note in the earlier and later days
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were Mix and Ford, Simeon Bristol and his descendants. In Mount Carmel, whose origins will be traced later, many of these settlers were pilgrims from the North Haven district, and the relation of Mount Carmel, in the early and even in the later times, was closer to North Haven than to the settlers from New Haven way.
Not only were the farming possibilities of Hamden attractive from the time of its first discovery, but it had something of the lure of a possible El Dorado. Geologically, as has been indicated, ITamden is highly interesting. The whole region, from the gateway between Mount Sanford and Mount Carmel, is the bed of a huge prehistoric river, of which the little brook, Mill River, is the main remainder now. Through that gap, which shows now the width of 800 feet, mighty floods poured to the plains below. At this point, no doubt, there was a waterfall that, if we had it in our day, would canse us to marvel less at Niagara. The result of the action of this water is seen in our time in numerous bowls and depressions all over the Mount Carmel and Hamden district, idly wondered at by the many, studied understandingly by the geologists.
And there were the mild mineral deposits which usually accompany an in- teresting geological district. Copper has been mined on Mount Carmel, though not in any profitable quantities. Iron and feldspar were found at other points. The only profitable mineral workings in the town today are the trap roek quar- ries at Mount Carmel, York Mountain and Pine Rock, and these are not com- plained of as lacking in reward for their workers.
From the beginning Ilamden has shown a sharp but not unfamiliar contrast of the agricultural and the industrial, as it does more and more of the urban and rural. The stream, as we have seen, early attracted the manufacturer. The Whitney industries, succeeding the older grist mill, early gave way to the beginnings of the Winchester Repeating Arms Company. Later that site came into the hands of the Aeme Wire Company, and there was established one of the strongest of the younger manufacturing institutions of the locality. It was not reckoned, however, a Hamden institution, for few recognized that the line between New Haven and Hamden eame so far south of the lake. But when in 1913 it ontgrew the quarters at the head of the lake and settled on Hamden Plains, it was surely known to be in HIamden. Here it has a large, new and modern factory, and is condneting one of the most important manufacturing plants in the region of New Haven.
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This seetion of Hamden Plains is in these times the real manufacturing part of Hamden. Some years before this the Mayo Radiator Company, which makes radiators for a good share of the gasoline motor cars of the country, built a large modern factory in the space between Dixwell Avenue and the Canal Rail- road at the corner of Putnam Avenue. The Aeme Wire Works came in just above. In January of 1918 the Marlin-Rockwell Corporation, the second great munitions industry which the war had created in New Haven, started a factory 400 by 140 feet just south of the Mayo Radiator factory. It was to be completed by March 15, and an enterprising contracting firm blasted the excavation for
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it out of an earth four feet deep in frost, laid its foundations in the hardest winter in fifty years. and finished the building, a monument to American de- termination and speed, in contract time. In that same vicinity the Economy Concrete Company has a plant. The Whitney-Blake Manufacturing Company, makers of electrie fittings, has just moved out from the city to a large new factory, making another of a notable group of eoneerns.
Augurville, on the bank of Mill River a mile below Centerville, got its name in the middle of the last century from its manufacture of boring tools. There in 1843 Willis Churchill established a factory, whose operator ten years later was the Willis Churchill Manufacturing Company. In 1863 it was W. A. Ives & Company, and in 1889 it was the Hamden Manufacturing Company. Then ilenry P. Shares, Charles I. and Jared Benham acquired it. At that time it employed about sixty men, and for some years later remained a prosperous concern. Gradually, however, it diminished, and now has entirely disappeared.
New Haven claims Charles Goodyear. It also claims the factory which for more than half a century has been making rubber goods under his pat- ent. But both are really of Hamden origin. The first factory of Leverette Candee used water power, and it was on Mill River just below Centerville. It was established in 1843, and operated there for twenty years. Then it moved to New Haven.
In 1863 Bela Mann and others acquired this faetory and established there a textile business, which in 1865 became the property of the New Haven Web Company, and was operated under that name for nearly fifty years, prospering and extending its facilities. It had one of the most important water privileges on the river, and made the most of it. In 1915 it was acquired by the American Mills Company, which a year or two later erected a new factory at the corner of Orange Avenue and Front Street in Allingtown, on the far side of New Haven, retaining the old factory as its "Hamden Branch."
The manufacture of bricks was known in Hamden as early as 1645. promoted . by capitalists from New Haven. The red clay which is the mother earth of much of Hamden is well adapted for this product, but as the years have passed the renter of the briek making industry has gravitated toward North Haven, and today there is very little brick making anywhere in Hamden.
A mile up the river from the web factory the Clark silk mills were estab- lished as early as 1875 by R. S. Clark, who before that had been making bells at this spot. It was a prosperous industry for a time, but some time ago most of the traces of it disappeared.
At Centerville the J. T. Henry Manufacturing Company has a factory where it makes pruning shears and hardware of similar nature. The W. F. Gibbs Manufacturing Company makes organ stop knobs at a plant on Central Avenue. The old factory of the Acme Wire Company at the very edge of New Haven, the historic side of the old Eli Whitney Works, is now occupied by the Sentinel Manufacturing Company and the Sentinel Auto Gas Appliances Company, which make gas stoves and soldering and iron heaters.
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In Hamden, aside from Mount Carmel, are four churches. The oldest of these is the Congregational Church at Whitneyville, or, as it was called when the church was organized in 1795, "Hamden East Plains." In those days the "Plains" extended much farther east than now, and the settlers in the western part of the town thought it not too far to come over to the east side to church. Abraham Alling served as the pastor of this church for its first twenty-five years. He was not edneated as a minister, but he was a man of zeal and power, and the people heard him gladly. He did a quarter eentury of real foundation work. The present church building was erected in 1834. For fifty years from 1838 Rev. Austin Putnam was its pastor, and under him the church grew with the growing community. In the later period it has had varions pastors, among them Rev. Charles F. Clarke, now practicing law in New Haven .. The pastor since 1912 has been Rev. Adam R. Lutz, who is leading its people in a notable service to one of the most rapidly growing of New Haven's suburbs.
Graee Church, Episcopal, in Centerville, dates from 1790. One of its early rectors was Rev. Charles W. Everest, who later established in the near vicinity the Rectory School. One of the most distinguished reetors the church has had was Rev. Joseph Brewster, father of Bishop Chauncey B. Brewster, who had charge of it for two years following 1881, when he retired from his thirty years' service with Christ Church of New Haven. He was its rector again from 1892 to 1894. At present Rev. Albert C. Jones is rector.
The Methodist Church at Hamden Plains was founded in 1834. It long served as a community center, until the pushing out of city life, and the establishment of a large factory district in the vicinity, materially changed the character of the community. The somewhat forbidding piece of architecture which had served as a church building for half a century was destroyed by fire in 1917. and just at present the church is making shift with Ladies Aid hall.
The Catholic Church at Highwood was established about 1890, and one of its first pastors was Rev. John T. Winters, who was a member of the Hamden Board of Education in 1894 and several years following, and a man highly re- spected by the whole town. The church is in a rapidly growing suburb, and does an excellent work. The present pastor is Rev. W. Kiernan.
Hamden has for some years past farsightedly met its school problems, which are intensified by the rapid growth of such sections as Highwood and Whitney- ville. Its outlying district sehools, though under the same difficulties as distriet schools in other towns, are kept up to a good standard, while some of the new buildings near the city, notably the ones recently built on Church Street in Hamden Plains and on Putnam Avenne in Whitneyville, are the equal of any in the city. Hamden provides New Haven high school facilities for its children.
There have been some excellent private schools in the town, among them the Reetory School, which in the days of Mr. Everest and Mr. Raymond who sueeeeded him was an excellent military seliool for boys. Hamden Hall, condueted by J. P. Cushing, formerly principal of the New Haven High school, is an institution of high elass.
CHAPTER XXXVIII
MOUNT CARMEL
THE INDEPENDENTLY FOUNDED AND DISTINGUISHED SECTION OF HAMDEN THAT LIES IN THE SHADOW OF THE FAMOUS OLD "SLEEPING GIANT"
Leagues off, the contour of his massive head Stands boldly out against the azure sky ; He lies serenely in his rock-bound bed, While rippling streamlets pass him swiftly by.
From many eity streets, his distant outline Touches the vision with delicious thrill, And longing faneies eagerly incline Your footsteps onward to his dreamy hill. -('HARLES G. MERRIMAN, "The Sleeping Giant."
I
The highest point of land anywhere along the Connecticut shore is that brief range of near-mountains which stretches from east to west across a part of the northern end of the town of Hamden, and gives name to that distinet community known as Mount Carmel. Known to older people in former days as the "Blue Fills," it has eaught the imagination of the younger generation as "The Sleep- ing Giant." It is no mere name of fancy. From far out at sea the voyager, catching the first view of Connectieut shore as it rises in higher background to low-lying Long Island, sees the plain contour of a reclining giant of the hills, sleeping his sleep of centuries. Or the traveler by land, as he rounds the top of higher eminences to the north, and 'gets his first view of the broad, blue Sound, finds lying at his feet the landmark so familiar to New Haven and the region 'round about. From Mount Tom and its vicinity, from many a commanding height to the far north, this southern Connectieut eminence, showing distinetly on unusually clear days, is known if not familiar.
New Haven, as one approaches it from the water, is easily known by its East and West roeks. But always looming to the north, double their height, grand in his rude beauty, inspiring in his unehanging rest, is the faithful giant in his age- long sleep. To nature lovers of all the country around he is dear, and to not a
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few who have made his closer acquaintance he has an increasing and unending charm.
It is not surprising that this challenging height should have attracted the first adventurers from the New Haven colony on beyond the plains of Hamden, to make their homes beneath its shadow. Faithful readers of the old Scriptures, fired by the holy faith which led on the heroic prophets of old Israel, the first settlers saw here a New World height which appealed to their imagination like the historic mount where Elijah fought his great fight with the prophets of Baal, and won the victory for truth and righteousness. So they called it Mount Carmel, and Mount Carmel it has remained to this day.
This probably was not until some time after the beginning of the eighteenth century. Venturesome pioneers had much earlier than that gone out from the shelter of the New Haven stockade, but what became Mount Carmel was ten miles from the Market Place, and that was a long journey into the wilderness. Whether or not he was the first, there is anthentie record that Daniel Bradley made the plunge in 1730. He seems to have come from toward the center of the colony, though we know that earlier than this New Haven colonists had established themselves in North Ilaven as neighbors to Mount Carmel. Perhaps a good many of those who came to join Bradley in the early days of his venture came across from North Haven, but however that may be. by 1757 there were settlers enough in Mount Carmel to earn for it a colonial charter. The granting of this made Mount Carmel the earliest recognized part of the town of Hamden, and justifies the estimate of it as a distinct community, although it has since 1786, when the latter was chartered, been a constituent part of Hamden.
It was a noble, sturdy company of pioneers who came with or followed hard after Bradley. From their records in the country churchyards could be written an elegy as noble as that of Gray. Most of them are names that live still in Mount Carmel parish ; all of them are names that have made and still make Conneetient or wider history. The foundations laid by Daniel, Joel, Amasa, Sterling and Horaee Bradley: Amos, Joseph and Henry Peck: Roderick and Ezra Kimberly : Nathaniel Tuttle and his descendants ; Ithamar, Job and Simeon Todd; the sneeessive Jonathan and later John Dickermans and a goodly group of their associates stand firm, and on them rests a citizenship that makes Mount Carmel of today. in addition to its many natural advantages, a most desirable place of residenee.
HI
At foundation Mount Carmel has been and remains chiefly a farming com- munity. But it has had its manufacturing institutions. Some of them are of the past. and ruins mark their sites. Mill River near its source, as it did near the point where it enters New Haven, early tempted those who knew the pos- sibilities of water power. Where else did it get its name, indeed, than from the mills which, from the early eighteenth century until now have marked its banks
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all the way from "The Steps" at Mount Carmel to the head of New Haven harbor? There are traditions, doubtless founded on fact, but lacking definite record, of mills for the grinding and drying of corn and other grains, for the sawing of lumber and the making of cloth at "The Steps." There the second dam across Mill River was built, the first being that erected for New Haven's town grist mill before 1686, where later Eli Whitney established his first faetory. The Mount Carmel dam started a series of industries, all of which are now gone. They were, in something like their order, a grist mill, a mill for fulling cloth, and later the Mount Carmel Axle Works. This in turn was succeeded by the Liberty Cartridge Company, whose factory was destroyed by fire in 1916, since which time the sound of wheels turned by water at that spot has given place altogether to the grind of the stone crusher, as it eats relentlessly into the head of the old Giant. This last, an industry operated by outside owners, is one in which Mount Carmel does not especially rejoice.
One manufacturing industry, Mount Carmel's substantial and surviving one, remains at the central point known as Ivesville. That is the brass and iron specialties factory of Walter W. Woodruff & Sons, founded in 1835 and enjoying good prosperity. Another foundry, located on Whitney Avenue in the upper part of lvesville, never depended on water power, but was to avail itself of the transportation facilities of that wonderful canal which was opened in 1825 from Farmington to New Haven, and caused more or less commotion in entting its way through Mount Carmel. That was the factory of the Mount Carmel Bolt Company. It had some years of prosperity, but was succeeded later by various oeeupants of its factory up to nearly 1900, when it was mostly abandoned, ex- cept for a brief time when the Stronse Corset Company of New Haven tried to rum it as a branch corset factory, but found it too disjoined from the main plant and from the city. Another stone crusher plant is located on York Mountain, west of Whitney Avenne, just below the plant which on the other side of the street is eating into the mountain itself, and from these two plants hundreds of tons of pulverized trap roek weekly go to serve for highways and cement con- struction to New Haven and the regions about it.
Mount Carmel has been a thoroughfare for a century. It is on the way to the important town of Cheshire, and through it to Southington, new Britain and Farmington. It is one of the routes to Waterbury. So it was that as early as 1722 there was what is called a "path" running through the town somewhat northward. It had to get over a real obstacle in that region between what is now the Mount Carmel trolley station and the southern boundary of Cheshire. Where the modern traveler by steam roads, by trolley or by motor ear bowls along over a level highway, there was, when the eighteenth century came in and for some years thereafter, a rock-ribbed continuation of the head of the old Giant westward toward the range that leads down to West Roek. Dynamite was unknown. Road building at that time followed the line of least resistance when it could, the line of greatest effort when it must. In this case the makers of the "path" climbed. Trap rock, which is the foundation of that obstacle,
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naturally shaped itself into steps. The travelers over that path at the first, on foot or on horseback, got over the declivity by following a natural stairway as hazardous, perhaps, as that down which Israel Putnam dared the redcoats to follow him at Horseneck in 1779. A little later, in 1798, when a turnpike was built over which chaises could go, the trap roek was drilled out a little, the grade made easier and the steps were filled in with gravel to make some sort of a high- way, but the traveler who navigated it must have felt that he earned his passage without having to give up the additional tribute which the toll keeper collected a little further down.
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