USA > Connecticut > Connecticut as a colony and as a state; or, One of the original thirteen, Volume IV > Part 12
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Always very ably managed, and with exceptional oppor- tunities for steady and profitable business, its stock has for years been extremely valuable, while the main line of the road is one of the best built and most completely equipped in the country. Vast sums have been expended on raising, straight- ening, and stone-ballasting the four-track roadbed, in provid- ing double stations between New York and New Haven, and doing away with grade crossings. The work that has occu- pied several years at Bridgeport, in elevating and straighten- ing the approach to and passage through that city, is regarded by civil engineers as of almost unparalleled magnitude.
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The grand total mileage operated is 4,506 miles; and the mileage within the State, 1,861 miles. That the railroads are an important force in the industry of the State may be seen by the fact that throughout their entire system in 1902-3 they gave occupation to 39,411 men, whose earnings amounted to the snug sum of $23,776,506.76. The gross, earnings of the roads for that year were phenomenally large, $48,988,685.72; and even after the enormous expenses had been deducted, and the portion belonging to outside stock- holders had been accounted for, a very comfortable sum was left to be distributed throughout the State. Owing to the general flagging of business prosperity since the middle of 1903, and the great increase in the price of coal and in neces- sary expenditure of all kinds, the receipts have temporarily diminished somewhat, although not to such an extent as on roads in some other parts of the country.
To the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad, during the presidency of Mr. Charles P. Clark, is owing the introduction to the country of the famous "third rail," used first on its direct line between Hartford and New Britain, with such satisfaction to the local traveling public that it was adopted on other portions of track belonging to the road.
The street-railway systems, which with the rapidity of the .
spider have laid their web of nearly six hundred miles of main line over the populous parts of Connecticut, have on modern life an influence which is important now, and possibly may become even more serious in the future. Naturally, they are concentrated around the two cities, Hartford and New Haven, in a thicker network than elsewhere; and it is observable that the desire to stretch out a feeble line to every hamlet that offered a possibility of a real-estate boom has
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yielded to earnest improvement of roads and equipment. They afford employment to some thousands of men.
These electric roads have opened communication between the large towns and far-outlying communities that would have seemed like a dream twenty-five years ago. What pleasure they have added to the poor man's holiday, what knowledge of the country they have given to the dwellers in cities, what broadening of ideas from commingling of the urban and the rural inhabitants, is an oft-told tale. One traditional feature of the country is, however, in danger of obliteration. Easy transit accomplished, the end of the country store is at hand. For many generations the theme of the wit and the poet, this "country club" of the village worthies has been a ready meet- ing-place where they could discuss the affairs of town and nation, could train the future leaders of Congress, and per- haps start the ripple that would roll into some wave of popu- lar feeling.
Already many of these emporiums of village trade and gossip have perished, killed by the grip of the iron rail that so alluringly pointed to the big department stores within the reach of five or ten cents. That means hard times now for the country store-keeper; it may mean a gradual change in the ideas of representatives at Hartford, and in the independence of thought of the country members of the General Assembly.
Railroads of both kinds have passed the time when they could be considered simply as a means of expanding travel and transportation. They have become interwoven with the most serious and far-reaching problems of finance, of politics, and of social science that this century offers. The "Connec- ticut" method of taxing them and other corporations has excited much discussion, and a similar scheme has been recom-
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mended in Pennsylvania by a tax conference, and by the Industrial Commission for the country in general.
Briefly stated, it is that the State taxes should be paid by the corporations. Since 1891, these taxes have been removed from the towns; and the corporations, beginning with rail- roads, and extending to almost all corporate enterprises, have paid their taxes directly to the State. Railroads are taxed on a valuation equal to the market value of the capital stock and total indebtedness, the railroads of the State paying in 1902-3 a Connecticut State tax of $1,032, 173.36. In this way, the corporations pay all the expenses of the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of the State government, besides pro- viding a large sum for hospitals, other charitable institutions, and for roads and public works.
There is a certain advantage in this : and moreover, it taxes the real value of the property as nearly as possible; it escapes the difficulties, in regard to interstate commerce of railroads, of a tax on receipts; and it reaches the property which is represented by bonds. On the other hand, it must be admit- ted that it strengthens the tendency of the smaller towns to let the cities pay all the bills, also that a full State treasury leads to supernumerary officials; and that, in many instances, where the corporation is local in its work and nature, as a street railway, injustice is done by diverting the revenue of the taxes from the community that grants the privileges to that corporation.
It is easy to see that agriculture is no longer of paramount interest in the State; and yet the assertions that occasionally float into the newspapers, setting forth the melancholy aban- donment of farmhouses and lands, give a very erroneous impression. In the proper sense, there are no abandoned farms in Connecticut. When they are unoccupied by owners
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or tenants, they are still used for various purposes, such as pastures or wood and timber; and they give a sure proof of being owned by having their taxes paid. An amusing story is told of a little book published some years ago by the State Board of Agriculture, giving a list of farms for sale. After a period of comparative obscurity, it was taken up by Coun- try Life in America and the Ladies' Home Journal, in such fashion that the careless public jumped at the conclusion that, in the astonished author's words, he "had a bargain counter in abandoned farms in Connecticut." Inquiries and requests poured in from all parts of the United States, and from other countries even to such uttermost parts of the earth as Aus- tralia and New Zealand, to such an extent that a second and a third edition of the book were required; and at last accounts, the demand was 2,000 in advance of the supply, and the author was ransacking the State for possible sellers of farms to meet this sudden expansion of the real-estate business. Moral : farms still have attractions, and Connecticut is not yet ready to take the place of London Bridge for Macaulay's traveler from New Zealand.
The acknowledged falling off in the profits made by farms, twenty years ago, was in most cases not an actual decrease, but a relative diminution when compared with the great prof- its of other occupations and with the expansion of living. In fact, very few farms have been run at a loss, if the cost of the support of the family and operation be considered. Since 1 890, a decided improvement has been noticed; the area and value of the farms has increased and their products have swelled from $17,000,000 to $28,000,000 in 1900. In 1892, Professor Brewer derived this encouraging conclusion from careful study :- "There is no decline in the number of per- sons employed in agriculture or in acres tilled. While no crop
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stands out pre-eminently, the output is varied and enormous and the value of products per acre is larger than in Indiana, Illinois, or Ohio." Since then, the interest in agriculture has grown, and the farmers have found that the dollars they were looking for might be like the button in the game, hidden very near home. In other words, they are learning to choose their products according to their ability to raise them success- fully; and they are studying scientific methods of putting economically the choicest quality on the market. It is a truism to say that the farming of to-day, with its machinery, and scientific study of foods and fertilizers, of drainage and seed-catalogues, is a different thing from that of the early set- tlers. Much advantage has been gained for the scientific knowledge of the business by the work and published inves- tigations of the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station at New Haven, and the Connecticut Agricultural College, founded in 1879 at Storrs. The latter is a little too securely tucked away to give farmers ready access to its work and its dairy-laboratory, the best-equipped in New England.
The butter-making toils of the old New England farmer's wife are now a memory, and science and machinery are made to do the work in numerous well-appointed and remunerative creameries. Since 1846, when John A. Taintor imported twelve of the best cows he could find in the isle of Jersey, Hartford County has been famous for its fine herds.
The Yale School of Forestry, too, has begun to arouse the desired interest in the woodlands of the State, which, not all of the same quality, extend over four-tenths of its area. A "State forest" of nearly seven hundred acres has been pur- chased recently, in the town of Portland; and there, as well as in various "stations," a State forester is authorized by the forestry act, effective in July 1903, to protect and cultivate
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trees for the benefit of the State, and to use it as a "demon- stration area" for an example in practical forestry. In addi- tion he is ready to advise private owners as to the thinning and planting, the treatment, propagation, and preservation of woodlands.
The dairy men and poultry-raisers are on the alert; the adaptability of much farm land for beef-raising is discussed; and perhaps the reluctance of the farmers in the northern part of the State to admit sheep to their rocky pastures may yet be overcome. The granite and brown-stone quarries of Canaan and Portland give warning that the farms must not expect a rich harvest when the quarryman does a good business, but the fertile river-valleys and smiling meadows of a large part of the State are just as attractive in their finished cultivation as ever they were.
Tobacco was exported to England from Suffield in 1763; and from that time the town has taken the lead in the State in the raising of that commodity. The Hartford County growers, knowing that, under favorable conditions, they could produce more pounds of their famous "seed-leaf" to the acre than any other part of the country, have been willing to endure disappointments in their fickle crop, to pet it with unwearied care, to shield it even, in these latter days, by acres of snowy screens, from sun and wind and insect pests, all for the sake of the great profits of the good years. The ordi- narily good yield gives from 1,800 to 2,000 and even 2,800 pounds per acre, and the prices are sometimes very high.
Fortunately, the soil most favorable for market-gardening lies in convenient proximity to the largest cities, and to the illimitable and never-satisfied market of New York. Conse- quently, market-gardening thrives. In fact, among a popu- lation having a large proportion of consumers, the home
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prices compare so favorably with those of the metropolis that there is little need of sending fruits and vegetables over the line.
In some departments of fruit-culture, Connecticut has been very successful. The apple, with its delightful associations, has always found a congenial home here; and as an example of what attainments it can reach, it may be said that from the experimental farms at the Agricultural College there were sent to Glasgow, in 1902, over a hundred cases of fine red apples, which returned double the price they would have received at home.
With all the éclat of a new fashion has come the revival of the peach orchard. The peach used to thrive in almost every dooryard in middle and southern Connecticut; and, sixty years ago, was so superabundant that the pigs feasted on the surplus bushels. Then came a long period when misfortune marked it for its own, and blight and yellows and hard win- ters made Connecticut peaches a rarity. But in the last quar- ter of the nineteenth century, a renewed interest in peach rais- ing was rewarded by remarkable success.
The "peach-king," J. H. Hale of South Glastonbury, has done more than any other man to accomplish this happy result. He had mastered some of the secrets of small-fruit farming, when his eye was caught by some old native seedling peach-trees that were faithfully yielding their fruit in an out- of-the-way spot. The idea flashed through his mind that the peach really liked the plain living of the soil around him; and in 1875, he planted the first commercial peach-orchard in the State. He waited and watched and hoped and was disap- pointed by four freezing winters in succession, to be at last rewarded by a $9,000 crop of peaches and small fruits from "a farm that tobacco-raisers thought was not good secur-
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ity for $2,000!" From that, care in selecting varieties, in cultivating wisely, and in insisting on perfection of individual specimens rather than bulk of crops, have made Connecticut peaches the choicest in the market in their season; and the Hale Brothers are now the owners of the largest peach orch- ards in the country, over 1,000 acres in Connecticut and Georgia, and over 2,000, including nurseries. The peaches raised by them in the two States are identical in variety, dif- fering in time of ripening only on account of climate. The first great crop of 1885 and 1889 stimulated others to plant largely in the State; and now Connecticut has nearly three million peach-trees in her orchards, and, taking precedence of Delaware, ranks next to Georgia and Maryland among the peach-growing States of the Atlantic coast.
The planting of peaches still goes on, and the actual enu- meration of the Experiment Station in 1902 gives 44,000 more trees than the U. S. census of 1900. The growers have learned many practical lessons during the last ten years, and the crop of 1902, a very fine one, was double that of 1892. "New Haven County leads with a total of 218,368 trees, and Hartford County follows with 166,966. Either of these counties has a larger number of trees in peach orchards than was contained in the whole State ten years ago," says the report of the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station for 1902.
So much for "intensive farming." The acres of the old State will never produce the huge harvests of the West, but they will not be idle if human ingenuity can devise any means of making them yield an increase.
Good roads are a boon to all classes; the bicycle and auto- mobile have done well if they have enforced the necessity of them on the public mind. Besides the 10,000 miles of con-
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necting roads, in the State, there are 5,500 miles of main highways; and during the years between 1896 and 1902, under able superintendence and with a definite plan, the State has given aid to towns on 1,400 miles of the latter, with results that would delight that advocate of good roads, Dr. Bushnell. Nearly every town has accepted the State aid, and the appropriation for roads grows steadily. This may be theoretically wrong, and a loss of town independence, but the traveler rejoices in the excellent thoroughfares.
That the paramount interest in Connecticut is manufactur- ing needs no argument. In 1902, 187,854 persons, one-fifth of the entire population, were busy in 1690 manufacturing establishments, which gave employment to from five to sev- eral thousand persons each. More than anything else, manu- factures have felt the tremendous impulse of modern scientific discovery and invention; and each achievement in the labo- ratory generally heralds an enlargement of some manufac- turing plant.
The General Electric Company sprang into existence in 1880, at the house of Mr. Frederick H. Churchill in New Britain; and the present vast development of electric loco- motion and appliances would have astounded the sons of James North in 1800, patiently making sleigh-bells and shoe- buckles in New Britain, then part of Berlin, finding saddle- bags sufficient for their freight to Boston and Albany, and looking to the minister, Dr. Smalley, for their financial back- ing; or Eli Terry, proud of his advance in 1817 in making clocks by machinery; or Eli Whitney, soothing the smart of his inventor's heart by starting the Whitney Arms Com- pany, in 1798, at Whitneyville, New Haven; but they might well be glad to see now that their insight and energy had descended to their followers and posterity.
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For it is very noticeable that not only are the names passed on from father to son and son's sons, sometimes for more than a century, but many if not most of the large man- ufacturing establishments have the weight and momentum of at least fifty years of existence. The term "manufacturing aristocracy" is not wholly misapplied, for not only are large incomes and vast financial interests handed down in a family, but also an accumulated fitness for the work, familiarity with details, and executive ability; together with a feeling of responsibility for the proper conduct of organized work, fraught as it is with grave meaning to thousands of people; all these descending in a way that corresponds to the inherited duties of great landed proprietors. It is no infrequent thing for the son of a millionaire factory owner to go into the works, begin at the beginning, and work up through the grades like ordinary employees, so that when he comes to the head he may have a personal knowledge of every detail and be able to act intelligently. Often the life of a vil- lage is bound up in the prosperity of one great estab- lishment; and while the responsibility is divided in the large towns and cities where factories congregate, yet it is a rare thing to find the consciousness of it entirely absent from the men at the head. With many of these leaders, the "great- est pride in life is the good name of the companies they rep- resent."
So many of these factories have placed themselves in the front rank that space fails to even lightly touch all. Many of them cover large areas, have excellent and well-appointed buildings, and are like villages within themselves, with inde- pendent fire departments and watchmen. Some of them have bestowed much thought and expense on the employees out of working hours, providing libraries, comfortable houses, and
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the elevating influences of trees and flowers. The aim of very many is to have the works and the products thereof the "best in the world." Hence comes the reputation of the fire- arms and ammunition and bicycles of New Haven and Hart- ford and Bridgeport, the brass and silver and britannia of Meriden and Waterbury, the table-cutlery, knit goods, and hardware of New Britain, the thread of Willimantic, the silks of South Manchester, and of the long list of foundry and machine-shop products, of rubber goods, carriages, pianos, sewing-machines, paper and wood pulp, needles and pins, tex- tiles, corsets, and fur hats.
In the proportion of production to population, Connecticut stands second in the United States, Rhode Island being first and Massachusetts third. And in nine out of ninety-nine in- dustries mentioned in the census of 1900, brass, hardware, plated and britannia ware, corsets, fur hats, hardware, cut- lery, clocks, needles and pins, and ammunition,-she stands first. For such work the wages arehigh, and have tempted crowds of foreign workmen to the State, at the rate of 30,000 for each of the two decades ending in 1900, besides 20,000 in trade and transportation in each of those decades. The capital invested in these enterprises has risen from $120,- 000,000 in 1880 to $314,000,000 in 1900, a great portion of it being centered in seventeen manufactures. The exports of the State have long been large, in many instances half and sometimes three-quarters of the product of tools and machines being sent abroad.
The census of 1900 sums up the reasons for Connecticut's prominent industrial position thus :- "The pre-eminence of the State in manufactures is due in part to its excellent com- munication by rail and water with all parts of the country, to its geographical location by which it can handle a large export
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trade, to its water-power, to its plentiful supplies of labor and capital, the former gathered easily in the great centres of the East and the latter coming to it not alone from its profitable manufactures, but also from its large insurance and banking interests and its joint-stock laws."
Besides this is the personal factor. In the administration of such industries the utmost perfection of organization is required, so that each worker may fit in his place with the exactness of the pieces of a watch; and fortunately, the State has had men who were suited for commanding such forces; men who, by native and inherited ability for both individual and administrative work, could bring the State to this high rank. Many of them have been highly educated, one well- known head of a powerful establishment keeping up his daily readings of Horace and Homer and Plato during his long and successful business career; some of them are fitted to grapple with almost any legal, financial, or political prob- lem; and the earnestness of such men, even when they may have appeared to make a fetish of work, has been felt by every subaltern.
The remarkable inventive genius that has long been a characteristic of the State has been a cause and an effect of all this industry. In proportion to her population, Connecti- cut has been and still is at the head of the United States in number of patents, having had in 1902 one patent granted to every 996 persons; the District of Columbia ranking sec- ond with one to every 1,063, and New York eighth, with one to every 1,589. For those who are curious in these mat- ters,it has been computed that as the United States leads the world in patents; Connecticut, the United States; and New Britain, the State; it follows that that little city, known as the "Hardware Centre" from its great production in hardware,
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"stands at the head of the inventive world." It may be added that the man there residing, Justus Traut, who has taken out the greatest number of patents, many of them small, has never lost money on one.
In the opinion of some, this ability to invent labor-saving devices, and machines that almost think, and so cunningly contrived that one will do the work of dozens of men, is slowly preparing destruction for itself and deterioration in the quality of workmen.
A limit in inventions is conceivable; and it is true that such machines may sometmes be worked by unskilled and therefore cheaper labor, which could thus find places that would have been closed to it in former years, when thinkers were necessary behind each machine. In the words of the American Steel Worker, "Competition has made it absolutely necessary that every possible means be taken to reduce the cost of an article without reducing the quality. If by the aid of improved machinery, it is possible to make one operation do the work of four, then there will be a saving." That the skilled and thoughtful mechanic, who has been an object of pride, is in danger of disappearing on account of his own meritorious inventions, is not a pleasant thought, and must be considered with the disquieting questions of strikes and social discontent which have accompanied the great army of foreigners that have invaded our State during the past twenty years,and have sometimes threatened to transform it.
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CHAPTER X THE INSURANCE INTERESTS
T is almost superfluous to say that Connecticut, and in Connecticut, Hartford, stands pre-eminent in the field of insurance; investigation shows that this reputation has been legitimately earned by the hard work of the able leaders and the application of strict business principles to the development of the science.
Our forefathers neglected to record whether the first risks were marine or fire; but the first partnership for insurance in the State was that of Sanford & Wadsworth, in Hartford, in 1794. These gentlemen undertook to assure the owners of dwellings that they would reimburse any losses by fire to the extent of the sum specified in the policy; and the first policy was issued to William Imlay, of Hartford. The busi- ness was practically that of individuals, something like the British Lloyds; and although, from time to time, several of these individuals combined in partnership, their arrange- ments were short-lived, and did not attain the dignity of for- mally chartered corporations.
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