USA > Connecticut > New Haven County > Naugatuck > History of Naugatuck, Connecticut > Part 11
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Fortunately Naugatuck was at no period a one industry town. In the decade before the Civil War Harry and David Stevens built up a $200,000 a year business in making car- riages which kept some 140 people busy producing nearly 200 fine buggies a month. Their customers were largely in the southern states where Connecticut products had achieved a wide reputation, perhaps the result of incidental advertis- ing disseminated by two generations of Yankee peddlers. But because of this localized market, the war brought the enter- prise to an abrupt close, when bills due from southern plant- ers could not be collected. Wheel-makers, however, carried on in Naugatuck. The Naugatuck Wheel Company in Mill- ville operated successfully until fire destroyed the works in 1867, and Hart Hubbell on Long Meadow brook ran his shop till the end of the century. Yet even in the 1880's when
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economic forces in American life were pushing toward the eradication of small manufacturing businesses Naugatuck clung with persistence to some diversification. For example, James O. May, a local druggist, succeeded in establishing in Union City a bottling business for ginger ale made by car- bonating local spring water. In 1888 the company was con- verted into the Diamond Laboratory Company for manufac- ture of patent medicines, primarily Diamond Marshmallow Cream, an emulsion reportedly helpful in curing throat and lung diseases. The Laboratory Company maintained its pres- tige and operated profitably down into the twentieth cen- tury.
But the manufacture of the small wares for which Salem had been known faded out gradually. Before midcentury the pre-eminence of Yankee notions had been coming to an end, although fabrication of buttons and similar light articles continued to be important for some years. In fact the fifties marked the peak of activity on Fulling Mill brook. Four button shops on the brook in 1850, producing annually about $100,000 worth of brass, tin, bone, and cloth-covered but- tons, had shrunk by 1860 to three shops with less than a sixth of the earlier volume; twenty years later only one button- maker survived, though some buttons were made "up the brook" until after 1900. Change in fashion, which elimi- nated decorative buttons from men's coats and waistcoats and reduced their use on women's clothes, explains the decline in demand, while the cost of small scale manufacture de- pending on water power doubtless accounts for the inability of Naugatuck button shops to compete in the narrowed mar- ket. Button-making by the 1870's had ceased to be an art and a craft and had become a mechanized industry. In the face of this situation the local button-makers converted to other lines or went out of business. Their abilities created for them opportunities of employment in the expanding rubber shops or the iron foundry, both industries with certain futures.
The other small wares produced in the shops along the
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brook before 1880 were varied in type-shoulder epaulets for Union soldiers during the Civil War, webbing for suspend- ers, hairpins, molasses gates, hose connections and faucets, harness rings, buckles, thimbles. The men who manufactured these articles were mostly direct descendants of the makers of Yankee notions, men whose inborn hankering for tinker- ing enabled them to adapt their gifts at least temporarily to meeting the wants of a new generation. In 1872 Homer Twitchell bought of Monroe Terrell the button factory built at the mouth of Fulling Mill brook and there began mak- ing umbrella fittings and safety pins. Rights to the Lindsay patent made Twitchell for many years the only safety pin manufacturer in the United States and for this line he used special machines. For finishing the umbrella "fixings," on the other hand, he adhered to the old system of letting out the work to women in the neighborhood who worked at home. Thus he combined new methods with old. Today this factory, now owned by the Naugatuck Manufacturing Com- pany, alone of all the mills on Fulling Mill brook is still op- erating. Even the successful Warner & Isbell foundry and machine shop, which had equipped many of the local mills with shafting, gearing, and various kinds of machinery, was not rebuilt after fire destroyed the works in 1883. Though a new plant was put up on the site in 1886 by a pump com- pany, it ran for only a year and was then abandoned.
Before 1880 also on the other streams tributary to the Naugatuck there was a number of diverse small enterprises. In a shop on Beacon Hill brook in the forties sulphur match- making originated; in another across the road from the Straitsville foundry Edwin Benham made stove- and shoe- blacking; and rumor reports that nearby at some period counterfeiters made paper money. About 1866 the Renz family converted the old Collins grist mill into a factory for shear manufacture; downstream two lumber and shingle mills turned out builder's supplies; and near the mouth of the brook in Cotton Hollow the Lewis cotton mill down into
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the seventies produced warps and coarse cotton yarns. On Long Meadow brook the carriage-wheel factories flourished and on Hop brook stood Nichols' slaughter house, a cider mill, a spool mill, and a sawmill, and for a time a pocket knife factory. The Ward brothers, however, tapped the Nau- gatuck river itself for power. In their little shop on the Ward farm after the collapse of their clock business they made first brass pins and later curtain rings and fixtures.
Meanwhile a new industry assumed a large place in Nau- gatuck: for a generation cutlery came to be the principal item of manufacture of the smaller shops. About 1848 Smith and Hopkins, then well-established button manufacturers, ventured into cutlery making and by 1850 were producing some $15,000 worth annually. This set an example to other small shopowners. The next year the Union Knife Company, sponsored by Enos Hopkins, opened a well-equipped factory on Fulling Mill brook where for nearly thirty years pocket knives were made in volume. But the insufficiency of the water power of the brook, which evidently dwindled as years went on, put the shop at a disadvantage, and when the factory burned in 1885 its owners abandoned the enterprise. Not long afterward the dam broke, so that today only a tangle of brush and boulders marks the site where seventy-five years ago German and English cutlers had busily turned out Union knives.
Several other cutlery plants, however, had sprung up in Naugatuck after the Civil War. Most important of these was the Connecticut Cutlery Company, organized by George A. Lewis, Bronson Tuttle, John H. Whittemore and other men interested in the iron foundry. While the Connecticut Cut- lery Company operated for less than fifteen years, it employed at one time 150 hands and produced annually over $160,000 worth of pocket knives and tailor's shears, as well as hair- pins, faucets, bill holders, and "elastic tires" for carriages. The company was a large customer for the castings made by the Tuttle and Whittemore foundry, for the shears were
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made by superimposing fine steel upon a malleable iron cast- ing. In fact, there is little doubt that the originators of the company launched the business in order to have an assured lo- cal market for part of the output of the foundry. By the time the Tuttle & Whittemore Company had extended its markets to all parts of the country, the shear shop on Fulling Mill brook, no longer essential as a customer, was allowed to die. For a time the Gifford Manufacturing Company took over the plant, but before the middle eighties its business in shears and edge tools had evaporated. The shop stood empty until in 1892 David Pratt set up his thimble factory there.
Of the lesser cutlery concerns, two ran for a very short time. German-born Leo Renz, on the other hand, after 1867 devel- oped on a shoe-string of capital a considerable business in shear-making. Most of his large family worked in the shop on Beacon Hill brook and only the death of the older generation brought the venture to an end there. Somewhat longer- lived was the Naugatuck Cutlery Company, formed in 1872, which, having acquired part of the Lewis cotton mill prop- erty in Cotton Hollow, carried on until 1888.
Thus for over twenty years Naugatuck was known as a cut- lery center as well as a rubber town. What the factors were that wiped out one industry in the locality while the other grew in strength is difficult to determine. First, doubtless, was the fact that the knife companies never were so well- financed as the rubber shops: the local backers of the bigger cutlery shops had many other manufacturing interests and, when competition from knife-makers elsewhere increased, Naugatuck men withdrew or sold out to these rivals. Greater mechanization made expert craftsmen less essential than for- merly, and cutlers could readily find employment in the malleable iron works or the rubber shops. Furthermore, the location of the knife and shear plants on the small streams, where water power had originally given them an advantage, in time came to be a nearly insuperable handicap. Substitu- tion of machine for hand work meant constant increase in
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power consumption, and supplementing water power with steam necessitated carting coal up the hills to the shops on the brooks. Transplanting the factories to sites on the rail- road in the valley was too expensive. So by 1885 the Nauga- tuck knife industry was largely a thing of the past.
The fate of the two textile mills which had initiated Salem into full-fledged factory production methods is easier to un- derstand. Gradually both ceased to play any dominant part in the town's industrial life. A fire in the Cotton Hollow mill in 1869 probably discouraged the Lewises from pushing warp manufacture here, now that other localities in New England, better supplied with power, more accessible to markets, and with great factories equipped with more modern machinery, had relegated the Naugatuck mill to relative insignificance. Moreover, the family was concerned in several more profit- able local industries to which in the seventies the brothers and cousins concluded wisely to devote their energies. The woolen mill, run for some thirty years by Thomas Lewis, continued longer as an outstanding enterprise. Unlike the cotton mill which had barely been able to hold its own, be- tween 1850 and 1870 the woolen mill expanded its business from $70,000 a year to nearly $200,000. To satinet manufac- ture Thomas had added the making of cassimeres and other light-weight wool fabrics in the sixties, and, by continuing the company store at which employees were expected to trade and local suppliers frequently had to take payment by barter, the company operated profitably throughout its life. Never- theless, in 1876 the property was sold to the Dunham Hosiery Company, a Hartford-owned concern, which converted the factory to knit goods-underwear, hosiery, sweaters, and jersey and cotton net for arctic and rubber linings. In this form Naugatuck's first large manufactory survived into the twentieth century. But the absentee-owned hosiery plant, in spite of its employing about 200 people in the nineties, never rivalled in importance the rubber shops or the iron foundry.
For second only to rubber, malleable iron making had
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come by the latter part of the century to be Naugatuck's chief industry. Its roots were here, in fact, before Goodyear displayed his vulcanizing process to DeForest and the Lew- ises, inasmuch as the foundry in Straitsville had been in operation since 1839. The story of the development of Bron- son Tuttle's and John H. Whittemore's malleable iron works is closely related to that of Eben Tuttle's hoe shop. Eben Tuttle, manufacturer of farm implements since 1822, in 1846 moved his shop from Prospect to a site on Fulling Mill brook where in a large new factory with improved power he greatly expanded his operations. About this time he took several men into partnership, and in 1851 the Tuttle Manufactur- ing Company was incorporated. But before long Tuttle be- came dissatisfied with this arrangement, not improbably be- cause, having always previously managed his affairs alone, he found collaborating with partners uncomfortable. So about 1851 he bought an old wheel shop located west of the Naugatuck river in "the flats" between the river and Hop brook. Here he set up a new hoe shop, leaving his former associates to run the older establishment "up the brook." The Tuttle Manufacturing Company, in turn, soon moved across the river to a site near the foot of Church Street where the company turned out a fine line of steel hoes and rakes for many years.
Meanwhile, Eben Tuttle, partly to satisfy a wish of his eighteen-year-old son, Bronson, in 1854 added an ell to the shop in the flats and, by agreement with the iron workers in the Straitsville foundry, moved the malleable iron works to the new shop. The American Malleable Iron Company, shown on the town plan of 1856, suggests that the Tuttle foundry for a time adopted that name. In any case, here iron- casting on a small scale proceeded as an incidental adjunct of the hoe shop until in the summer of 1858 the hoe shop burned to the ground. But the ell housing the iron foundry was not destroyed, and young Bronson Tuttle, then twenty- two years of age, persuaded his father to permit him to
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form a new partnership to develop the malleable iron busi- ness instead of rebuilding the hoe shop as such.
Bronson Tuttle's partner in this doubtful venture was John H. Whittemore, the twenty-year-old son of a minister in Southbury, Connecticut, a young man who had come to Naugatuck in the spring of 1858 to do some bookkeeping for E. C. Tuttle & Company. Whittemore's father had to sponsor for his son, not yet of age, the loan of $1,000 from a New Haven bank. He was warned by the bankers of the grave risk of so large a loan to a young man with no experience and little judgment. The rest of young Whittemore's share of capital he borrowed of Bronson Tuttle. But John Howard Whittemore for all his youth was a young man of acumen and determination. To Whittemore's financial perspicacity his partner, Bronson B. Tuttle, added the practical experi- ence in iron-working gained first in his father's hoe shop and later in the association in the foundry with the malleable iron workers from Straitsville. Abetted by the knowledge of iron- founding brought by Stephen Warner, Noyes Wilmot, Pat- rick Martin, Jacob Keeling, and a few other older men, Tut- tle and Whittemore embarked upon the task of building up a great industry.
Refined malleable iron castings in the days before steel was made in this country were needed for a great variety of purposes where strength together with bending properties were necessary. From the very beginning the partners found much of their business in miscellaneous jobs for which their customers supplied the patterns. But they soon developed some specialties, evidently partly determined by local de- mands. The wheels for the fine Stevens carriages and the wagon wheels made in Naugatuck's wheel shops required malleable iron castings to reinforce the hubs. In this field Tuttle and Whittemore found at once a steady outlet almost at their doorstep. The demand for sturdy hub reinforce- ments for the heavy caissons and wagons used by the Union armies during the Civil War increased this market, and
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in the firm's early years carriage irons and harness trimmings comprised nearly half the business. Manufacturers of agri- cultural implements also needed the malleable iron castings, and the Tuttle Manufacturing Company, as well as rake- and scythe-makers elsewhere, became eager customers. Snath- makers, who turned out the wooden handles for scythes and sickles, for many years bought cast malleable rings in volume.
Soon after the conclusion of the Civil War the develop- ment of castings for "steel-laid" shears created a line which remained one of the major items for the foundry for nearly fifty years. The launching of the Connecticut Cutlery Com- pany in 1866, financed by the men interested in the iron works, probably marked the beginning of the shear castings business, for both the pocket scissors and the large shears produced in the Fulling Mill brook "Shear Shop" were made by welding sheet steel to malleable castings of the proper size. Other cutlery firms quickly followed as customers, so that the Naugatuck foundry was soon supplying all the chief shear-makers in the country. One entire furnace was dedi- cated to shear castings until in the twentieth century forg- ings began to supplant malleable castings for scissors.
During the 1870's when American railroads were spread- ing new networks of steel over the continent, Tuttle and Whittemore found a profitable article of manufacture in Pratt washers used on the fish plates with the bolts to hold the rails at each end. Assembled with pieces of rubber bought of Naugatuck's rubber shops, Pratt washers, named after their originator, were turned out in enormous quantity here. The railroads used other malleable parts too, but orders for other items never ran so large.
But even with ready markets and skilled foundrymen in charge of production, making malleable castings was a costly enough business to make one today marvel at the courage of the two young partners. The pig iron alone cost them in their second year of operation once and half their total cap- italization, and had a melt been spoiled the loss must have
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been a heavy burden. In actuality by 1860 the firm had al- ready an annual production of over $51,000, and by 1870 was turning out 650 tons of castings a year valued at $130,000. Profits were ploughed back in, and capitalization was in- creased from a few thousand dollars to $30,000, to $60,000 and then to $100,000 in less than thirty years. New units were added to the plant-new furnaces, a pattern shop, assembling shops and an office, the latter for some years providing space also for the Union City railroad station. In 1871 Tuttle and Whittemore, having outgrown the partnership, incorpo- rated as the Tuttle and Whittemore Company, eighteen years later reincorporated as the Naugatuck Malleable Iron Company. Their investment by then had been extended to foundries in other cities, Cleveland, Chicago, Indianapolis, and Bridgeport.
As the volume of business expanded, the numbers on the payroll also increased. The forty employees of 1860 grew to ninety in 1870 and in 1883 to 368, not a great number com- pared to the rubber shops' but over twice the number of people in any other one factory in the town. Yankees, Irish- men, Englishmen, Germans, and after 1880 a few Swedes and a handful of Poles worked side by side in the foundry, in the performance of the heavy day's labor building up among themselves a curious rough camaraderie.
In keeping with the tradition common in many metal working shops of nineteenth-century New England, Tuttle and Whittemore through most of this period manned their plant by the "contracting" system. That is, a master work- man-a pattern-maker or a molder or an annealer-con- tracted with the company to produce a given quantity of work for the year. The company supplied space, heavy equip- ment, heat and light, the contractor the workmen and small tools if any were needed. So Samuel Hopkins and James Murphy for some years were the contractors for the general foundry work, including molding, core-making, and melt- ing; Oscar L. Warner and Patrick Brennan held the con-
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tract for trimming, annealing, and shipping. The contrac- tors, paid by the company a flat sum or a stipulated amount per ton, were free to engage their help on any basis they could. The scheme had the advantage that every contractor was eager to teach his men the most efficient methods of work, but it created a temptation to pay helpers as little as possible. Whatever did not go out in wages could go direct into the contractor's pocket. While the belief was general in Naugatuck that the ordinary foundryman was not well paid, no one thought of questioning the system; it made bookkeep- ing simpler for company officials, was usually satisfactory to the contractor, and possibly held out hopes to the common workman that if he worked hard enough he might him- self eventually be able to act as a contractor.
In view of the status of working people in Naugatuck in the 1880's, the contracting system in the foundry, the sea- sonal employment at the rubber shops, and the uncertainty of the future in the cutlery plants and the button shops, it is not surprising that a vigorous lodge of the Knights of Labor appeared when the followers of Terence V. Powderly began to organize. The labor paper this group sponsored fur- nishes our only clue to the power of the local lodge, for, as was traditional in all functioning of the Knights of Labor, its very existence was veiled in secrecy. The collapse of the national organization ended the career of the Naugatuck lodge before it had made any definite moves to alter local conditions. But the existence of the lodge, however brief, shows an awareness among Naugatuck's laboring classes that the community was no longer a country village but a part of American industrial society.
The fundamental social changes in these fifty years brought about by the town's industrial growth was closely linked with the improvement in transport. The completion of the first rail line from Bridgeport through Naugatuck to Waterbury meant easy movement of freight, raw materials, and finished products, but greatest of all in significance,
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coal. The water power of the Naugatuck river itself was not large enough to supply many factories, and Fulling Mill brook, the chief tributary within the town's limits, never produced more than 240 horsepower. Nearly every successful shop in Naugatuck was supplementing water with steam power by 1880, a situation that would have been im- possible without coal, in spite of the quantities of wood avail- able on the hillsides and burned in many plants on the brooks for some years. And as hand fabrication and finishing gave way to mechanization in every factory, power consumption increased. This fact alone explains in large part why the plants located in the center with the railroad tracks running past their doors, expanded, while those lining the brooks to which coal had to be carted uphill shrank and eventually closed down. The importance of the railroad was so obvious that in 1880 and 1881 a branch of the New England Railroad was put through the northwestern section of town.
Yet though after 1849 the steam car supplanted the stage- coach and cart for hauling freight in and out of the valley, the teamsters, the blacksmiths, the feed-dealers, and the livery-stablemen were still vital to the town's economic life. Down into the twentieth century teams of powerful draft- horses carting goods to and from the railroad depot were a familiar sight, a necessity to mill-owners, a means of liveli- hood and pride to their owners, and a source of pleasure to small boys.
Meanwhile the steady expansion of industry and the at- tendant increase in population naturally opened up oppor- tunities for building contractors. In some measure the saw- mill operators gave way to suppliers of brick, as fire hazards dictated the substitution of brick for wood in mill construc- tion. But frame dwelling houses continued to be the rule, and the lumber dealer, the carpenter, and the tinsmith made a substantial, even if not a luxurious living.
The opening of a job printing shop in town in 1886 also may have been an indication of the general confidence in
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Naugatuck's future. The appearance of local newspapers coupled with the rising interest in advertising gave F. K. Perry his start. He printed the Advocate during its short life, and later, because of the quality of his press work, many other firms gave him orders. A town aspiring to be a manu- facturing center could well afford to support a job printer.
The growing factories with big payrolls to handle every month affected another aspect of Naugatuck's business devel- opment, for in time local banking facilities were needed. The first institution, however, The Naugatuck Savings Bank and Building Association, had a brief and inglorious career. Launched in 1853 as a co-operative, it aimed at providing financing for new houses, stores, and mills. Henry Baldwin relates that L. S. Spencer, the first depositor, opened his account with $10 one day and turned around four days later to draw out $190. Inexperience and over-optimism, tempered doubtless by some stupidity, obliged the directors to close out when the country-wide panic of 1857 put severe pressure upon every banking house in the United States. The state legislature annulled the charter in 1858. Thereafter until 1870 Naugatuck had no bank of any sort. In that year, in spite of the memory of the earlier misadventure, local business men held a mass-meeting to consider means of pro- viding safe investment of the savings of mill hands and other small investors. So the Naugatuck Savings Bank opened, us- ing as headquarters for a number of years the office of who- ever happened to be the treasurer. The first deposit was $5, from a fourteen-year-old colored girl. State laws now guarded the administration of mutual savings banks, and the trustees and officers were meticulously careful. Arthur H. Dayton was made manager in 1885 and remained in charge for more than fifty years. Under his able direction the Sav- ings Bank established a firm reputation for stability.
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