USA > Connecticut > New Haven County > Naugatuck > History of Naugatuck, Connecticut > Part 4
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The books which the committee purchased and permitted members to hold for a two-month period were, as was to be expected in the eighteenth century, largely dissertations on religion. But a few volumes of travel and history also found their way into the list, and in the nineteenth century some fiction was added. Though proprietors were subject to severe fine for lending a book to anyone not a member of the com- pany, we may assume that this rule was not vigorously en- forced and that a good many residents of Salem profited by the library without having to be admitted to membership. In the absence of school libraries or any but a very few text
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books, the Library Association performed a valuable service to all Salem.
In reviewing the obligations of the Salem Society itself, it is important to remember that before the separation of church and state in Connecticut an ecclesiastical society had civil, as well as religious, functions. By law, regardless of church membership, all inhabitants living within the limits of a legally incorporated ecclesiastical society were to con- stitute a school committee which must meet at least once a year. Judd's Meadows, to be sure, had had its own school since 1731. A record of the early 1770's, kept by Samuel Lewis, lists school receipts and expenditures: "to Daniel Warner for keeping school at Judd's Meadows £1, 10 S. March 1771"; "to Olive Upson for keeping school 13 s. 4 d., April 1771,"-evidence that then, as now, the schoolmaster was better paid than the schoolmistress. In 1785 an eighteen- year-old girl, as her son, Persis Smith, long afterward related, taught here for ninety cents a week, investing proudly her summer's earnings in six yards of calico costing ninety-six cents a yard to make her first fine dress.
With the forming of a separate society Salem organized its own school committee, voted local taxes, five pence to the pound, and appointed a local collector of the "rate." The next year residents of Gunntown petitioned for a separate school and so the South West School District was created. Soon after the schoolhouse was erected near the western limits of Gunntown. Four other districts were similarly set off before the end of the century, east of the river in 1778 the Middle School District, which included sections of Milford and Derby, and in 1790 the Pond Hill District; and west of the river in 1778 and 1779 the Lewistown and Partridgetown Districts.
From later descriptions we can picture fairly clearly what the schoolhouses before 1800 were like. The small one-room building, roughly clapboarded outside but lathed and
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plastered within, was lighted by two windows on each of the long sides. At one end, or at each end, was a huge fireplace where a wood fire kept the temperature above freezing, but scarcely warmer in midwinter. Boys took turns in keeping the wood boxes filled and starting the fire before school be- gan in the morning. Their fathers sometimes paid their school taxes by supplying wood, chestnut, oak, or walnut for the winter's fuel supply. Along the walls on three sides of the schoolroom stood backless wooden benches, while a shelf nailed to the walls about three feet from the floor served as a desk for the older boys and girls. For recitation periods the older scholars swung their legs over the bench to face the room and used the edge of the shelf as a backrest. Younger children were seated in the center of the room on wooden slabs, the rounded surface downward, supported by four legs set in augur holes. These "seats" without backs were all of a height, frequently so high that the five- and six- year-olds could not touch the floor with their feet. No wonder they spent hours "busy" keeping still. Just inside the door facing the schoolchildren stood the teacher's table presided over by the schoolmaster, lately himself a farm boy of the neighborhood, or by the school-dame, often a girl of not over seventeen or eighteen only recently through with her own schooling.
Contrary to the current conception of eighteenth-century school supplies, in Salem slates and slate pencils did not come into general use till about 1820. Before that time dark- colored paper, or perhaps occasionally birch bark, was meted out to the children for their writing exercises. An old book for beginners in writing states:
Necessary implements are a penknife, quills, paper, good and free ink, likewise a flat ruler for sureness; and a round one for dis- patch; with a leden Plummet or Pencil to rule lines; also gum sandrich powder with a little cotton dipped therein, which rub gently over the paper to make it bear ink the better.
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Certainly teacher and children both regarded penmanship as a fine art to be cultivated with infinite pains, and the letters and records of the day usually are models of orthog- raphy. Children learned to read from the Bible, the Psalter, and Benjamin Harris's New England Primer. With the in- troduction of Noah Webster's Speller in 1783 spelling be- came a regular part of schooling, and spelling bees, for . grownups as well as children, became popular. The result is noticeable in the disappearance of the quaint and infinitely varied phonetic transcriptions of earlier records. Arithmetic, the third "R," was the only other subject taught. Congress's adoption of dollars and cents, in place of British pounds and pence, involved modification of earlier arithmetic texts, al- though many farmer-storekeepers' accounts continued to keep the old style reckoning. In 1788 Nicholas Pike of New- buryport, Massachusetts, published an arithmetic which was widely used until Root's Introduction to Arithmetic ap- peared in 1796. Pike's book contained "A Perpetual Al- manac," and the proportions and tonnage of Noah's Ark. Most boys and girls proceeded only through division, with a brief exposure to "vulgar" fractions, and anyone who ciphered through "Old Pike" earned the reputation of being a "great arithmeticker."
Beside these church and school affairs the Salem Society probably had direction of some few other local matters, super- vision of highways within its limits, maintenance of the bridge over the Naugatuck river, and the appointment of Daniel Warner as gravedigger. This doubtless was the same Daniel who taught school in Judd's Meadows. But upon whatever concerned the township as a whole the town at meeting in Waterbury center continued to pass.
Salem Society had thus to begin its home rule at the very time that the American colonies were taking their stand against British Parliament and King. Waterbury as a whole was strongly anti-British, and the sturdy Puritan views of most of Salem suggest warm support of the American cause.
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While we may assume that the townspeople collaborated in non-importation from Great Britain and the other pre- liminary measures of protest, it was not until 1774 that Waterbury voted in town meeting to follow explicitly the recommendation of the Association of the General Congress by appointing a committee to observe the conduct of persons suspected of being hostile to the colonies' cause. From the Salem Society Captain Gideon Hotchkiss and John Lewis were the committee, and we may be sure that the Gunn and Wooster families and others were promptly recognized and "contemned" as enemies of American liberty. At the end of November 1774, a town committee, John Hopkins and Samuel Lewis for Salem, undertook to collect contributions for the relief of the poor in Boston, cut off by the Boston Port bill from food supplies ordinarily landed in the port. How generously Salem responded to the appeal no record tells, but as the proportion of "meeting-house people" to Church of England supporters was eighty-two to nine, it seems logical to suppose that Salem gave its share.
In military support Waterbury outdid her neighbors. In 1775, ranking as the twelfth town of the colony in point of wealth, she sent off one hundred and fifty-two men, more than any other town in Connecticut except Farmington. The young men from Salem's jurisdiction cannot all be identified, but some twenty-seven are known to have served at one time or another with the troops from Connecticut in the course of the next seven years. Headstones in the old Pine Hill cemetery mark the resting place of several of these men, but of their lives as soldiers and citizens no significant facts have survived.
During the colonial wars against the French and Indians Judd's Meadows had seen some of her men march off, never to return. But until the 1770's this relatively remote region was little involved in British empire-building strategy. By the time of the Revolution the northern part of Waterbury had a good east-and-west road leading from Hartford toward
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the Hudson and Fishkill, the southernmost highway from New England to the west to be safe from British battleships in the Sound. Over this road through northern Waterbury Continental soldiers moved back and forth at fairly frequent intervals. But Salem, lying several miles to the south, had few direct contacts with the Army and only once, in 1777, do we hear of troops quartering here for the night at the inn established in the Porter homestead. Husbands and sons who set off with any one of the Waterbury companies were equipped from home with makeshift uniforms and blankets, and usually each man had his own musket. But the families then left at home had scant notion of their men's doings unless a chance courier brought a letter or until, at the end of their enlistments, the men themselves straggled back. Salem was neither more nor less patriotic than her neigh- bors, and only a handful of her men, turned soldiers, served more than a few months at a stretch.
The only dramatic local episode of the war occurred a short time after the Declaration of Independence. In 1776 Long Island and western Connecticut offered many oppor- tunities for illicit trade or looting expeditions which could be undertaken in the guise of punitive patriotic raids by either Sons of Liberty or Tories. So when rumor reached Gunntown that a Long Island merchant, suspected of smug- gling property of both British and Americans, had removed a store of valuables to Bethany, young Tories here were in- spired to raid his house to carry off the "stolen" property. Perhaps the expedition into Bethany and the violent, though bloodless, appropriation of the merchant's stores would have passed off successfully had the small Gunntown band not been thrust into the role of kidnappers. As the half-dozen young men of Salem were returning through Judd's Mead- ows with their loot on the night of the raid, they came face to face with young Chauncey Judd, son of a staunchly pa- triotic family. Sixteen-year-old Chauncey had been at a quilt- ing bee in the neighborhood and, having squired home one
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of the young women at the party, had lingered on in her kitchen till a late hour. The appearance of anyone on the road at midnight in Judd's Meadows took the raiders by surprise. The boy tried to persuade his captors that he would not raise hue and cry against them if they would let him go unmolested, but, as he had recognized the local youths, the leader of the group, a professional soldier, refused to hear of so risky a course. So Chauncey was carried off. The small band spent the night in Jobamah Gunn's barn and the next day stopped at David Wooster's, where Chauncey for safe- keeping was hidden in the old well until the party was ready to move on.
But the boy's disappearance together with the news of the robbery in Bethany had roused the country-side by now, and vigorous pursuit began. Five days later Chauncey's brothers and other Judd's Meadows patriots caught up with the kid- nappers and the boy was returned home. Local indignation ran high, and the young Woosters were heavily fined and sen- tenced to four years in the Newgate copper-mine prison. The older men in Gunntown who had connived with the kid- nappers suffered sharply too. Chauncey's father sued David Wooster, Sr., Jobamah Gunn, and others for the boy's abduc- tion and mistreatment, and the damages awarded him were heavy enough to ruin the Woosters utterly. The story goes that in paying his fine to the Judd family, Jobamah Gunn, clad as always in the black knee breeches and white stockings befitting a British gentleman, brought out from his house the 800 pounds in silver coin, carried in his beaver hat.
Such happenings naturally inflamed the ardor of Ameri- can patriots in the vicinity so that we wonder that the Gunns and other British sympathizers were able to weather through the later years of the Revolution in Salem. Nevertheless, the Tory families did not remove, and the Gunns survived as wealthy landowners for another generation.
Yet in spite of waves of strong anti-British sentiment in the community, there is no positive evidence of Waterbury's
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being affected by the events of these troubled years. Farmers with surpluses of cattle or grain doubtless made profitable deals with Continental or Connecticut commissaries, and probably the local blacksmith drove a thriving business in mending harness and shoeing horses for army wagoners and couriers. But the impetus usually given by war to industry and raising of food stuffs left no sharp permanent mark. The town of 1783 seems little different in character from that of 1775. Certainly Salem showed no change of historic signifi- cance. The tax list of 1782 names only one man, Irijah Ter- rill, as shopkeeper or trader. One blacksmith, one wheel- maker, two tanners and shoemakers, two tavern-keepers, and two mill-owners comprised the rest of the list of men in Salem whose special properties, or "faculties," were assessed. Sol- diers returned from the war to resume life as farmers and makers of small household necessities, or, disabled and ill, soon to die and to be buried in the town burying plot. All Waterbury rejoiced in peace and guardedly welcomed the ratification of the Constitution. But so far as the historian today can detect, Salem's everyday life went on undeterred by political wrangling in the world beyond the Naugatuck valley, neither hampered nor benefited by changes in the larger American economy.
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CHAPTER V
The Emergence of the Small Shops
FTER the Revolution the people of Salem, like Ameri- cans everywhere, faced an accumulated shortage of all manufactured articles. But unlike the situation oc- curring nearly two centuries later after both World Wars, in the 1780's there was little money to buy with. Formerly the farmers of this region had been able to purchase English or foreign manufactured goods from merchants in New Haven, bartering rye, hay, apples, or dairy produce for the articles which country people could not make at home. But now that Connecticut and the other new American states were ex- cluded from the special trading privileges of the British Em- pire, many manufactured wares badly wanted for farm and household use could be bought only at prices out of reach of the up-country farmers. In the Naugatuck valley, how- ever, even before Alexander Hamilton submitted his famous Report on Manufactures, a number of men began to see the possibility of meeting their own most urgent needs by adding to farming the making of household goods and farm tools both for home use and for exchange with the outside world.
The water power and considerable mechanical skill were already here. Men had operated grist mills and sawmills on the mountain streams from the earliest days of Waterbury's settlement; flour for bread and lumber for houses and barns were primary necessities. Small undershot waterwheels, easily installed, harnessed the power of the brooks tributary to the Naugatuck, freeing the planters from the need of de- pending on mills in Farmington, Wallingford, or New Haven; and before the first generation of Waterbury pro- prietors had relinquished control to younger men, they had established besides sawmills and a corn mill at least two
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blacksmith shops and a fulling mill for cloth. In these shops and others started later in the eighteenth century Waterbury men acquired the skills which after the Revolution were gradually to transform the valley into a manufacturing re- gion.
The first pioneers had brought with them axes and scythes of English manufacture, and these were handed down as priceless possessions from father to son for generations. Yet the role of the blacksmith was from the very beginning of the community one of the most important. The local smiths, though unable to make fine edged tools, had still turned out many lesser items essential to life on this New England frontier. Thomas "Smith" Judd and his successors in the village smithies early produced plough shares, harness buckles, nails, kettles, and other household utensils from the iron ores of western Connecticut, while their neighbors, using the wood from the heavily timbered hillsides, made rakes, trenchers, and crude furniture. Though metal-work- ing on any considerable scale was not developed hereabouts before 1800, the smiths acquired a valuable knowledge of working the Connecticut iron and copper ores which was to form a sound basis for later industry.
By 1790 Salem, apart from Waterbury center, had four sawmills of her own, a grist mill, Jude Hoadley's cabinet shop for making spinning wheels and small wooden wares, the Gunn iron furnace on Long Meadow brook, a small establishment for carding wool, a cooper shop, and Jared Byington's smithy and nail factory. With the exception of the smithy, these shops supplied local necessities only, without furnishing a surplus for selling beyond the valley. The nail- maker alone made his wares in quantity large enough to mar- ket outside the neighborhood.
Jared Byington was in fact Salem's first manufacturer. Stubborn and hard-headed as his own nails, his character was manifestly not one to endear him to his neighbors; his quar- rels with his brethren in the church, his suit for slander, and
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finally his excommunication for adultery, as we shall see later on, show him as an irascible, possibly even a mean, man.
But his pertinacity and his mechanical gifts enabled him to build up an industry which outstripped in volume of business all the earlier undertakings in Salem and which was profitable not only to himself but to the community as well. The second man in Connecticut to receive a patent from the United States, he used his nailing-cutting machine and a later patented device for heading nails to turn out his wares in quantity. While he himself and his sons worked in the smithy, at the end of the century he employed on the job of nail-heading six other men in his foundry, a large number for the shop of those days. His pig iron, like the ore for the Gunn furnace on Long Meadow brook, was unquestionably bought from the mines in Salisbury, Connecticut, and carted over the hills by ox team to his shop on Fulling Mill brook. In 1801 Byington sold the blacksmith shop-though ap- parently not his foundry across the road-to a group of men for button manufacture. Years later his sons revived the nail factory for a time, but by then their father's contributions to Salem's industrial beginnings had been largely forgotten. He died in obscurity without achieving recognition for the part his inventiveness and organizing capacity had played in his community.
Byington, by running a farm as well as his shop, set another useful precedent for a long succession of Salem shop- owners after him. Whether or not he originated the scheme of hiring boys in the neighborhood to work his farm in order to release him for work in his smithy, certainly later shop- owners evolved a full-blown system of cheap boy-labor to tend their cattle, plant their fields and gardens, help mow the hay, and load feed, butter, or apples on carts to be driven to New Haven to market. As late as 1853 for four dollars a month John Hopkins employed eleven-year-old Henry Bald- win to do much of the hard work on his farm, while Nathan-
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iel Carroll, the carriage-maker, was regarded by the boys he hired to do his farm-work as a kind of Simon Legree because of the long hours of heavy work he demanded in return for meagre pay. Only in haying season were the shops closed down in order to turn every able-bodied boy and man in the country-side into the hayfields.
Thus the town all through the nineteenth century was in some measure a farming area, and the most mechanically- minded men in Salem owned farms upon which their fami- lies lived. Down to nearly 1890 for most households farming and manufacturing were supplementary. Alternate means of earning a living stabilized the community and, particu- larly in the early years of the century, saved the manufac- turer, struggling for a start, from the worst effects of recur- ring business depressions. The farm was always there to fall back on. If water to turn the mill wheels failed for some weeks, if temporarily the cost of raw materials exceeded the means of the shopowner, or if market possibilities seemed uncertain, the enterpriser could simply cease to run his shop. The hired hands could find farmwork nearby, and the shop- owner and his sons spent the interlude in cutting additional supplies of wood, cultivating their fields with their own hands, and living on the land without cost other than hard physical labor until the moment came when resumption of manufacturing should be profitable. Capital outlay for the shop was small enough so that suspension of operations was relatively inexpensive. But because the men of the valley were by natural inclination and gifts more mechanics than farmers, the shops almost always reopened and men, joyfully accepting the challenge of the workbench, resumed their "tinkering."
While Jared Byington, the first man in Salem to produce on a scale to mark him truly a manufacturer, turned out metal wares as a natural outgrowth of his profession of black- smith, the men who followed him in the next forty years had no such directing background. What then led them to make
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"Yankee notions"? Almost any household goods that they could have manufactured cheaply and transported to the backcountry the farmers of remote villages would have bought eagerly. But difficulty of transport limited the Salem manufacturers and determined what they could make profit- ably. For "notions" most of the raw materials were available in the neighborhood-Salisbury iron and Newgate copper, wood, wool, and hides from the farms of the Naugatuck val- ley itself. Furthermore, marketing finished articles light in weight and small in bulk presented none of the problems imposed by shipping heavier manufactures. At a time when the roads were still so impassable that a man on horseback could not count on covering in a day more than a short dis- tance, this was an important consideration. In 1780 coun- try people regarded ten miles a good day's journey, and forty years later only travel by the main turnpikes under ideal conditions guaranteed as much as fifty. So it was that "Yankee notions" became the manufacturing mainstay of the region, things which demanded some skill or experience to manu- facture but which were small and light in weight and could be carried by peddlers either afoot or ahorseback. Heavy articles ran the risk of costing more to deliver than the traffic could bear.
Moreover, none of the Salem farmers hankering to start a manufacturing enterprise on the mountain streams had much liquid capital to begin with. Armsmakers like Eli Whitney of New Haven, Simeon North of Berlin and Mid- dletown, and Asa Waters of Millbury, Massachusetts, were aided by government subsidies. But the small shopowners of western Connecticut, the clockmakers, the iron-founders, the tanners, the wheelrights and blacksmiths, had to finance their own undertakings, counting upon their own ingenuity to make well-constructed articles that could be sold at prices to fit the purses of an eager but impecunious public. Hence it was sound instinct which led the mechanics of this region to devote their skills to manufactures which demanded small
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capital outlay for materials and tools, which could be packed by peddlers to the backcountry and which, by their very essential nature, could be laid aside for a time to be marketed profitably the following year if hard times in the country made any given moment unpropitious for a deal. As late as 1845, when many Salem shops had existed for thirty years or more, $1,000 constituted the average capital invested.
The term "Yankee notions," which smacks today of a shadowy, unimaginable past, had very definite connota- tion in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Sometimes now associated with the apocryphal wooden nut- meg, Connecticut notions meant small household articles, singly inexpensive yet wholly indispensable-needles, pins, buttons, buckles, combs, eyelets and later hooks and eyes, pen knives, shears, mousetraps, forks and spoons, pans, ket- tles, and occasionally clocks. Since these were wares needed in every backwoods settlement, their marketing was surest by house to house peddling; and the "packmen" who brought their goods to remote farms and villages usually ex- pected payment by exchange. Beside bed and board to the peddler, the up-country housewife might offer worn-out copper pans and kettles, salvageable for the metal, rags for paper-making, skins from her sons' winter trapping, home- spun woolens or linens, and some hard money. The peddler must have been at times puzzled about how to drive his bargain advantageously and still be able to carry away on his back whatever he accepted in payment. A young man who engaged himself to market the notions for the Salem or Waterbury makers had to be both shrewd of mind and vigorous of body, for his pack, slung over his back, was loaded to capacity and topped perhaps by a mantle clock, while from his belt he might suspend a kind of saddle bag jammed with smaller items. On his return trip the cumbersome ket- tles or worn-out stills, the bulky rags, pelts, or fabrics made his journey still more laborious. Horse-drawn two-wheeled buck boards or carts naturally superseded the peddler on
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