USA > Connecticut > New Haven County > Naugatuck > History of Naugatuck, Connecticut > Part 12
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Still a savings bank could not meet commercial banking needs and before 1883 Naugatuck business men had to rely upon Waterbury and New Haven banks. But the arrange-
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ment had obvious inconveniences: stories tell of sudden dis- covery at noon of a note due that day at a New Haven bank, so that, to save his credit, the borrower had to drive a horse into a lather to reach the bank before closing hours. In 1883, therefore, a group of leading citizens applied for a charter for the Naugatuck National Bank. Originally capitalized at $100,000, the bank began business in the Town Hall. Its officers were wary and steered the institution through the successive ups and downs of American business cycles with- out loss to stockholders or depositors. In 1890 its resources were over half a million dollars. The town by 1893 was thus a well-rounded, largely self-sufficient community.
Only in retailing did Naugatuck fail fully to meet its own requirements. Local merchants could not keep pace with the town's industrial development; Waterbury and New Haven, large cities, were too near. Meat markets, grocery stores, a modest haberdashery, several drygoods and "fancy goods" stores, a stove and hardware shop, a furniture dealer's, as usual combining a house-furnishing with an undertaking business, two drug-stores, and, toward the end of the century, an ice cream parlor existed, but these were small scale "empo- ria." About 1885 a local ice dealer began to peddle ice. But as the prosperity of Naugatuck's factories grew, well-to-do people tended to purchase all but the daily necessities in the larger stores of the neighboring cities, or even to make shopping expeditions to New York. Though mill hands pa- tronized the local stores only, their incomes limited their purchases to inexpensive items. So mercantile interests, as in other small manufacturing towns, became overshadowed on the one hand by local industry, and on the other by metropolitan competition. The railroad in some ways af- fected the small town merchant nearly as adversely as it benefited the manufacturer. And Naugatuck in 1893 was ir- revocably dedicated to manufacturing.
Thus by the time that town government was changed to borough government, the main lines of Naugatuck's devel-
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opment were laid down. The petty capitalism of the first half of the century, when a few hundred dollars accumulated by farming or perhaps in selling woodland was enough to fi- nance a small shop, had given way before the pressure of industrial capitalism, with the forming of corporations. Now the advent of much larger, wholly impersonal organization was at hand, whereby local enterprise was to be immediately affected both by the interests of unknown stockholders scat- tered over the United States and more directly by banking interests in Wall Street. Who paid the piper called the tune. The local self-sufficiency alluded to earlier was to become more and more superficial. The small shopowner-the but- ton-maker and producer of other Yankee notions, the cutlery manufacturer, like the clockmaker before him-was pushed out of existence by large-scale enterprise, financed by money brought in from outside the Naugatuck valley, depending upon expensive machinery for economical operation, sell- ing its products in a national market not to be reached by peddlers or New England jobbers. Though Naugatuck em- ployers continued to be influenced by awareness of the di- rect effects of wagecuts or layoffs upon their employees, their fellow-townspeople, increasingly their ability to diverge from the pattern of industrial management as it took shape elsewhere in America was limited. Units of the United States Rubber Company or the Naugatuck Malleable Iron Com- pany, now closely related to foundries in all parts of the United States, could not decree wage rates or hours of work without consideration of conditions in other sections of the country. Naugatuck, without knowing it, was enmeshed in the new American industrialism.
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PART IV Naugatuck the Borough, 1893-1944
CHAPTER IX
Borough Government and the Community
N AUGATUCK was established as a borough by act of the Connecticut legislature in January 1893. (See Appendix IV.) Unfortunately, the circumstances leading up to this change of status are nowhere recorded. Some twenty-five years earlier a few townspeople had pro- posed petitioning for a borough charter, but the motion had led to nothing. In 1895 the Naugatuck Citizen Souvenir hinted of gross abuses in management of town affairs in the late eighties and alluded to the valiant efforts of the sturdy citizens who defeated the corrupt machine. But we are left to guess that from the defeat of petty local bosses, whose very misdemeanors are not specified in print, arose the move- ment to have a new form of government.
The concentration of authority in the hands of the War- den and the advisory Board of Burgesses permitted more ef- fective municipal planning than was possible under the system of town selectmen, but otherwise for years the change made little difference. Amendments to the charter in 1895 and 1897 extended the borough limits to include the whole town, added to the former list of officials, created a Borough Court, and laid restrictions upon spending the public money. The freemen in town meeting had to approve the annual budget in detail, and money voted for one purpose could not be spent for another. So control of the purse strings was left with the citizens. Most public officers held the same titles and performed the same duties as under the town; only now some were appointed by the Warden instead of being elected. But as salaries for most borough officials were nominal or nil, the men who accepted office were generally public- spirited citizens more concerned with serving the commu-
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nity than with private advantage. The Warden received $200 a year. Nevertheless being Warden was an honor sought by men of all types and of many different walks in life.
This machinery of government for a community of less than 15,000 persons usually functioned adequately. Nauga- tuck's greatest period of growth took place between 1890 and 1900 when population increased from 6,218 to 10,541. By 1915 the population numbered just under 15,000 in- habitants, somewhat more in 1918 and 15,051 in 1920. From 1911 onward some citizens agitated periodically for a city charter, believing that it was costly in delays to have the Warden and Burgesses obliged to pass upon virtually every petty detail of borough administration, and in 1925 a pro- posal to hire a City Manager was lost by only a few votes. But in spite of some irritating drawbacks to the borough re- gime, it served reasonably well. A Warden before the 1930's could give satisfactory service to the public without spending more than a few hours a week at the job. Then, when the de- pression heaped upon him many additional responsibilities, the freemen raised his salary to $2,000 a year.
The zeal of the Warden or the pitch of public enthusiasm for improvements determined whether the borough adminis- trations slid along in a routine groove or undertook major innovations. Demand for better fire protection in 1895 led to installation of a fire alarm system and more hydrants, need of better street lighting resulted in multiplication of arc lights, and heavier traffic in the streets, particularly after the coming of automobiles, brought sidewalks, curbing, and pavements. Yet when the Warden in 1911 invested some thousands of dollars in brick-paving Maple Street, the main thoroughfare from the west to the east side of the river, the hue and cry against his extravagance prevented his ever being re-elected, though today, thirty-five years later, Wil- liam Neary's brick pavement is still in good condition. While that first big paving job was in process, laying telephone and electric light wires underground in the center was com-
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pleted also. Little by little successive Wardens undertook paving, widening, and straightening of streets, planting trees to replace those cut down, extending water mains and sewers. Gradually the country town assumed the outer mien of a city.
Today it is hard to envisage clearly the Naugatuck of 1895 or even of 1910. The difference between 1865 and 1 895 is shown somewhat by pictures, but no photograph of the borough in the nineties reveals the mud or dust of the roads, the ugliness of protruding telephone poles, and the unsightliness of the rubbish dumps on the river banks. Year by year the rubber shops were spreading out over the south- western section along the river bank, while to the north in the flats the foundry was covering a wide area with its fur- naces. East of the river, however, along the brooks where industrial life had been concentrated in midcentury, aban- doned mill sites grew in number until by 1910 both Fulling Mill and Beacon Hill brooks had nearly wholly reverted to blackberry patches and second growth woodland. But before 1910 city planning in the center effected two great changes which made an enormous difference in Naugatuck's ap- pearance.
The first change centered about the green. There two handsome new buildings arose in 1894, the Howard Whitte- more Memorial Library on the east, and the Salem School on the west. The former was one story, built of hewn stone on simple classical lines. The school, which replaced the old frame schoolhouse of 1852, was of warm red brick, three stories above ground, but so set against the hillside at its back that it fitted cosily into its surroundings. Still more revolutionizing eight years later was the removal of the beautiful white clapboarded Congregational church from the corner of the green near the Soldiers' Monument. Lo- cating the new church across the road next to the parish house opened up the green into a pleasant, unbroken square of greensward. But the substitution of a somewhat ornate red
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brick church with a massive towering belfry was less happy. The graceful spire and the restrained lines of the old meeting house had proclaimed the New England town in a manner not possible in any new church, no matter how imposing.
The loss of the old meeting house notwithstanding, the center was steadily improved. In 1905 a magnificent new brick and stone high school, like the Library and the Salem School the gift of John Howard Whittemore, was erected along the cliff road above and just north of the Salem School. Stanford White, one of America's most distinguished archi- tects of the period, designed it. Built right into the hillside, one story high at the west but, because of the sharp drop of the terrain, three stories on the east toward the green, the new high school was so much the wonder of its day that in Believe It or Not, Ripley drew attention to it. Near its base on the "Horseshoe Green," the donor's son some years later erected a bronze shaft in commemoration of Naugatuck's soldiers of World War I. Diagonally across the green the Neary building went up in 1911. Its substantial three stories looking out over Church Street at once provided Nauga- tuck with a modern office building and rounded out the town center architecturally.
The second outstanding change in Naugatuck's appear- ance came from shifting the railroad tracks through the cen- ter in order to eliminate dangerous grade crossings. Origi- nally the line had cut from the river near the old Ward shop up between Church and Water Streets into the very heart of the town. To move the tracks and still have factory sidings available necessitated swinging the river bed eastward for a stretch of nearly two miles, so that the tracks might skirt the west bank from Maple Street to the rubber regenerating plant. The task begun in 1906 consumed nearly three years but left the borough both safer and, seen from the west, more attractive. Yet the shift sacrificed a long stretch of the river bank and made the view of southern Naugatuck from the hills to the east irredeemably industrial. And it meant
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that future generations could not fully exploit the scenic possibilities of the stream, though later walling the embank- ment above the Whittemore bridge and laying out walks along it salvaged part. After the tracks were moved a fine- looking new passenger station was built somewhat north of the old, and a new freight depot half a mile south. Upon the site of the old depot on Maple Street the Fire Department then built its engine house.
Other improvements to the business center followed. In 1910 the death of John H. Whittemore gave impetus for erecting a memorial to the man who had given the town its two finest schools, its handsome library, and various other benefactions. At a great mass meeting citizens decided that a bridge would be a fitting monument; so with funds raised by public subscription a stone bridge at the foot of Maple street was begun. The building of the bridge gave opportu- nity to all citizens, rich and poor, prominent and obscure, to share in a public service, and when completed in 1914, the John Howard Whittemore Memorial Bridge lent the borough new dignity. Not since the raising of the Civil War Soldiers' Monument had so many citizens shared so whole- heartedly in a community undertaking.
On Church Street in the next twenty years new buildings arose which further added to Naugatuck's appearance. A fine Post Office was erected beyond the Savings Bank build- ing of 1911 and in 1930 a new home for the Naugatuck Na- tional Bank, both banks and the Post Office constructed on classical lines in keeping with the Whittemore Library adja- cent. The original National Bank building next to the Town Hall was then, by gift of Miss Gertrude Whittemore, con- verted into a children's library. Across Church Street near St. Francis' church and next to St. Francis' school in 1922 subscribers built a three-storied red brick building for the Y.M.C.A. Further up the street stood St. Francis' rectory, an attractive new building for the telephone company, and a number of spacious residences. Beyond in the flats near the
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foundry, the Hop Brook School, gift of Harris Whittemore, was built in 1916.
Meanwhile houses for Naugatuck's growing population had been multiplying in every section of the township. On the hillside west of the river the well-to-do built roomy, com- fortable, frame houses circled by wide verandas that com- manded sweeping views out over the valley. Here well-kept lawns and flower beds were universal. In the outlying rural areas old farmhouses were modernized and new houses built. In Union City, south along Main Street, and along the road to Bethany mill hands built less pretentious houses, financed by borrowings from the Savings Bank or the Build- ing & Loan Association. For though Naugatuck's factory workers were not people of means, most of them succeeded in building and owning their own homes. Few were the streets along which one could walk at the end of a summer's day without seeing on the porches of the little clapboarded houses workers and their families rocking away in cane- seated rocking chairs, or perhaps weeding the vegetable and flower gardens in the yards. Two- or three-family tenement houses were the exception, as each new family to come to Naugatuck strove to save and build for itself.
But as this outward urbanization proceeded, the borough encountered some trying problems. Perhaps most urgent was the need of sanitary sewers, made essential by a piped water supply and inside plumbing in homes. Yet year after year the citizens in town meeting postponed shouldering the cost. In consequence, half a dozen private Sewer Associations sprang up, to which residents of different neighborhoods contributed but which before 1921 were not under borough control. Three separate outlets fed sewage into the river from these privately owned sewers. At length in response to the insistence of the borough Engineer the borough began to acquire title and to lay out a unified town system. Had the freeman in 1895 or in 1901 or in 1910 heeded the pleas of the Warden, Naugatuck might have had an efficient layout
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at fractional cost. The piping installed at twenty-eight cents a running foot with labor at $1.00 an hour could have been laid at eight cents a foot by workmen paid $1.50 a day. A disposal plant, planned since 1929, has not yet been achieved.
Although one might have anticipated severe epidemics resulting from lack of proper sanitation, the death rate of the borough was surprisingly low. Before sanitary sewers were laid, the annual rate was about seventeen per thousand, and by 1903, when some work on a sewage system had been completed, it had dropped to 13.3. Still the incidence of con- tagious disease was discouraging. The Citizen's boast of 1895 that "the pure fresh air and open surroundings of necessity have an elevating influence on the moral natures and an in- vigorating effect on the physical beings of both young and old" was not wholly justified. For nearly thirty years the borough suffered occasional inroads of typhoid fever, and in 1912 faced a siege of smallpox, when over three hundred cases were reported within a few months. Scarlet fever, measles, and diphtheria also took annual toll, some years a heavy one. In 1903 scarlet fever was so rampant that the schools had to be closed for five weeks. The public health officer and the medical profession worked diligently to im- press upon townspeople the vital necessity of observing basic laws of public hygiene and with the inauguration of daily health inspection of schoolchildren after 1905 succeeded notably in curbing the spread of contagions. This wise policy was carried further in 1920 by the appointment of a public school nurse who maintained contact with parents, followed up care of children needing medical attention, and gradually effected a general understanding of the urgency of super- vision of children's health. In 1927 the School Board added a dental hygienist.
While "the pure fresh air and open surroundings" of the borough doubtless contributed to Naugatuck's relatively good health record, we must also pay tribute to the town's doctors. In the fifty years before 1944 the position of the
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medical profession here changed much less than in bigger cities. Lack of a hospital and public clinics kept doctors in the role of general practitioners making house visits to their patients and acting in the psychologically valuable capacity of confidant and friend as well as healer. The competent "country" doctors who served the town with devotion and intelligence compensated for their lack of specialists' knowl- edge by common sense, familiarity with the daily lives of their patients, and warm personal feelings for their well- being. The physicians perhaps more than any other one group were able to carry over into mid-twentieth century the direct neighborliness that the hurry and mounting im- personality of peoples' jobs had partly destroyed. Confidence in the rightness of local doctors probably offset somewhat the general tendency to procrastinate about public health meas- ures.
The slowness with which the borough undertook respon- sibility for public health was not due to callousness but to concern over the expense. Since most men owned their own homes, as taxpayers they were anxious to keep the tax rate low. As everywhere in the United States, the cost of munici- pal administration was mounting with dizzying speed. The town debt of $2,862 in 1874 had grown to $170,923 by 1895, and by 1923 the borough debt was $340,741. Taxable prop- erty had of course also increased in value. The "Grand List" of 1874 read $1,541,283, whereas that of 1923 was $17,297,- 620. But if borough expenses continued to rise even that figure must look small. In effort to establish borough finances on a sound basis, refunding bonds were issued in 1923, in 1931 trunk line bonds, and in 1934 another series of re- funding bonds. By the spring of 1939 the funded debt from a peak of over $500,000 had been brought down to $450,- 000; the total debt was $610,027. Ordinary expenses plus expenditures for permanent improvements that year ran to nearly $543,000. Nearly every year brought greater public charges which New England thrift, exercised to its utmost,
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could not evade without loss of essential services to the com- munity.
Nor could the borough consistently raise taxes without danger to its citizens' livelihood. In 1898 when the rubber re- generating plant burned, involving a loss of over half a million dollars, company officials announced that they in- tended to rebuild it elsewhere where taxes were lower. Anxiously the Warden and Burgesses angled for reconsider- ation, only to be met with the flat pronouncement that un- less valuations of the shoe company and reclaiming plant combined were set at not more than $1,000,000, Naugatuck would lose the regenerating plant. The freemen, called into special meeting, argued the pros and cons vigorously. Reduc- tion by $141,000 of the United States Rubber Company's assessment meant either a higher tax rate or higher valua- tions on other property in the borough. Was having the plant here worth the concession? Reluctantly the majority con- cluded that it was, and voted a five-year abatement of the earlier valuation. Since Naugatuck wished to expand its industries, it dared not kill the goose that laid the golden egg. The action was amply justified by time: by 1933 all Naugatuck property of the United States Rubber Company was listed at over seven and a half million dollars. Still the Board of Trade, set up in 1906 to advertise Naugatuck's ad- vantages for manufacturing, had constantly to consider whether any new enterprise established here could give full returns in employment to offset possible costs to the public in terms of services demanded.
For steadiness of employment for Naugatuck's residents was of course the key to prosperity. The depression of the nineties was not acutely felt in Naugatuck. Industrial un- employment in 1894 and 1895 was countered by a borough program of public works, including digging the first public sanitary sewers, widening and paving streets, and laying some sidewalks. When in 1907 and again in 1920-21 brief periods of slack work came in the shops, distress for working people
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was not long-enduring. Indeed the greater expense of poor relief following World War I the Superintendent of the Poor attributed to the after-effects of the "plague of influ- enza" which in the fall of 1918 struck Naugatuck with un- usual ferocity, mowing down the breadwinners in many fam- ilies and forcing whole households into dependence upon public aid. In these circumstances, when disaster seemed to be clearly an act of God, the borough abandoned publica- tion of the names of persons receiving public assistance. Since at least seventy of the one hundred families dependent on public support in 1920-21 traced their predicament to the influenza epidemic, human decency dictated saving them the humiliation of having their names entered into the annual published borough reports, and, the Superintendent added, "We hope by this method that morbid curiosity and petty jealousy can in part be done away with." Thereafter until 1930 poor relief shrank.
But the depression of the thirties was another story. In every manufacturing community in America the situation was much the same, and Naugatuck fared far better than most. Yet the community of some 3,700 families in the winter of 1934-35 was giving aid to 717 families, 3, 140 persons, over a fifth of the whole population of the borough. An Unem- ployment Fund created by private citizens in 1930 helped reduce distress and at the same time furthered a number of civic improvements, but the burden upon the community touched both the purse and the heart. Federal and state funds eased the financial obligations upon the local administra- tion, but the welfare budget consumed over $76,000 at the height of the depression and even in 1937 about $57,000.
No one could wish to revert to the era of town government when poor relief devolved in some measure upon kindly neighbors, when sanitation consisted of private sewer sys- tems or cesspools and outhouses, when epidemics ran their course yearly without investigation of health officers, when garbage was collected from private householders by farmers
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who fed it to their pigs, when fire and police protection was nominal only, and street lighting, public water mains, and paving nonexistent. But public assumption of these services was costly, and occasionally citizens boggled over shoulder- ing any new financial burden.
The heaviest single obligation upon the community from beginning to end was its schools. In schoolhouses alone the borough seemed always to be falling short of what was re- quired, in spite of the extensive building program carried out in the last years of the town. Citizens in 1894 expected that John Howard Whittemore's gift of the Salem School would relieve the Center District of any expense for new schools for some years thereafter, but within three years school population had again increased enough to make im- perative some additional space. Two more schoolhouses in the Center were built before 1898 and a private school, the Academy of the Sacred Heart in Waterbury, took some Roman Catholic children. And still the schools were over- crowded. At this point St. Francis parish came to the rescue by building its own parochial school. Any reluctance citizens felt at having schoolchildren now segregated on religious lines was generally submerged by relief at being freed of further public expense. Want of a high school building by the turn of the century was again met by the individual gen- erosity of John H. Whittemore who not only paid out of his own pocket for its erection but donated $40,000 for main- tenance. The roomy new high school, equipped with labo- ratories, a manual training room, a kitchen for domestic science courses, a large auditorium, a gymnasium, and eight airy classrooms, was placed under the direction of a borough committee and made available to schoolchildren from all districts. Soon after the completion of the high school the Pond Hill and the Middle Districts each built a small new house, the former one-room, the latter two.
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