USA > Connecticut > New Haven County > Naugatuck > History of Naugatuck, Connecticut > Part 5
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foot or horseback as soon as the roads were good enough to carry a vehicle to the remote villages where the peddler was most welcomed.
But the drawbacks notwithstanding, the Yankee peddler at the beginning of the nineteenth century was a universally recognized force in American commerce. Later in carrying goods over into the Ohio valley he generally used pack horses, or, if an independent trader, a wagon. But in the early years the packmen who set out every year from the Nauga- tuck valley laden with "Yankee notions" evidently most often went afoot, covering in their journeys western New England, upper New York State, and sometimes Pennsyl- vania and some regions of the southern states. Timothy Dwight, in writing of the Connecticut peddlers before 1815, describes their trips as covering an extensive geographical area over a period of six to eight months every year, but sug- gests that they frequently returned to the shop from which they were sent to turn in what they had collected and to pick up new loads of notions.
No account book, journal, or diary survives today to give any direct clue either to the Salem shops' arrangements with the packmen or to the routes these first "drummers" tra- versed. In search of the most profitable fields of vending, the peddlers from Salem probably headed west over the Straits- ville Turnpike toward Litchfield and thence south, west, and north. Selling to the big cities was via a jobber in New Haven, readily reached by cart from the Naugatuck valley. In Salem itself the general stores, where householders bought sugar, molasses, or luxuries like tea and calico, never sold locally made goods over the counter, for the neighbor wishing but- tons or a whip or a hoe went straight to the shop where the article was produced.
The first shopowners were primarily hand craftsmen, rather than manufacturers in the modern sense, and few possessed many power-driven tools. Judge Hoadley, the cabi- net maker, late in the eighteenth century ran a footlathe for
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turning his wooden rolling pins and bowls, and Jared By- ington's patented nail machines and trip hammer made his shop a model. But otherwise before 1808 all the finishing and much of the preliminary work in Salem shops was done by hand. Thereafter power-run machines, however crude, mul- tiplied, and the purchasers of Byington's smithy found it worth while to construct a flume half a mile long to supply their new button factory with power. Eventually the button makers probably copied the English machinery that Water- bury manufacturers had installed. But meanwhile, as men in Salem shops gained experience, they began to devise their own shortcuts in methods of fabrication. Various labor- saving machines must have been built to use the water power of Fulling Mill and Beacon Hill brooks, though, when the inventors failed to apply for patents, knowledge of how their machines operated has been lost.
A number of Salem men did, however, patent their ideas. So Martin Stevens, one of the first fork-makers in the neigh- borhood, patented his method of tempering forks and devel- oped a business before 1815 which employed twenty men. Amasa Goodyear, father of Charles of rubber fame, and for a short time a partner of Stevens, took out several patents, particularly notable, a special process for making round-tined forks. Other Goodyear inventions which he made in Salem included an enclosed oil-burning lantern and a special spring steel hay fork. The producer of the first pearl buttons made in America, Goodyear at a later date worked out with Austin Smith and his son, Asahel Smith, a successful method of mak- ing bright metal buttons. A mixture of copper, tin and spelter was poured into metal button molds in each of which was placed a wire shank with an eye to sew through. The buttons when cast were polished on a lathe to give the bright finish desired by tailors who used them on swallow- tail coats. In 1838 Asahel Smith, in a shop higher up Full- ing Mill brook, introduced a new process for manufacturing
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bone buttons. Power-driven saws sliced the ivory nuts and a hand lathe then drilled out the buttons.
To "Yankee ingenuity" is often attributed all the advances in mechanics and manufacturing in America in the pre-Civil War era. Every part of New England-and, in fact, many sections of the Middle States also-shared in developing the machines, machine tools, and shortcuts in methods of manu- facture that overcame the handicap of insufficient man- power. Men of the Naugatuck valley played their part in this drama of industrialization. In the latter part of the nine- teenth century Naugatuck contributed some distinguished enterprises. But before 1844 the shops here were small, pro- duction was limited, and the men who were the brains be- hind the most prosperous concerns were little known out- side the neighborhood.
What kind of men were these first manufacturers? Un- questionably they were endowed with some of that indefin- able Yankee ingenuity which is glibly supposed to explain the early industrial progress of this country. This same in- ventiveness directed at making life more comfortable and labor easier has frequently astonished other peoples in Amer- ican soldiers overseas. Whether New Englanders, Southern- ers, or Westerners, these Americans displayed the gift, fos- tered in this country, which led American boys to convert old gasoline cans and odds and ends of piping into shower baths in the jungle, or to make radios and victrolas out of cast-off military equipment. The forerunners of these make- shift inventors, and the predecessors of the engagingly adapt- able Peterkin family of the 1870's, the Salem mechanics applied their improvising talents in their shops.
That making goods instead of raising crops was their first interest is proved by the number of men who spent years of their lives at one manufacturing venture after another. We have evidence that they were makers of things rather than makers of money, for few of the shopowners of the early
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nineteenth century were consistently successful, and most of them faced sharp financial reverses, if not utter failure as manufacturers, at some period of their careers. In the twenty years between 1836 and 1856, Henry Baldwin, writing in 1885 of his boyhood memories, declared, every shopowner in Naugatuck faced months when he could not pay his help and often teetered on the ragged edge of bankruptcy. Shops passed from owner to owner, usually shifting product with the change in ownership, with a frequency that is at once surprising and confusing.
For example, Jesse Wooster, with Loren Isbell as partner, began drawing wire at Baptist Meeting House Corner on Fulling Mill brook about 1825, moved his operations to Platts Mills in Waterbury, dissolved that partnership and entered into another to make clocks on Hop brook, moved this work to Rubber Avenue, shifted to manufacture of cast and horn buttons, and ended in 1842 making german silver combs. Meanwhile Isbell continued in the Fulling Mill brook shop but switched his product to bone buttons. Such versatility was the rule rather than the exception.
But the very diversity of articles made over the years sug- gests a pertinacity in the character of the men running the establishments, a persistent faith that, if changing tastes or needs eliminated the profit in one item, another could be found which the shop could successfully produce. Mechan- ical aptitude, confidence in the ultimate triumph of hard work, and readiness to adapt their business on a small scale to an altering pattern of life are the outstanding traits of these earliest shopowners. They had skill; they had courage; they had interest in their creations; they had sons or sons-in- law to give help in the shops; and they had their farms to depend on in case of financial disaster. In families like the Isbells, the Smiths, the Warners, and the Hines, sons worked alongside their fathers or uncles, and, when the older genera- tion withdrew, carried on, perhaps in a new location, a slightly altered line.
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As Jared Byington showed Salem farmers how local re- sources could be turned to manufacturing, so it was probably the Grilley brothers who inspired the first shopowners on Fulling Mill brook to make buttons their specialty. Henry Grilley of Waterbury in 1790 had persuaded an English workman to divulge to him the formula British shops used to cast and finish pewter buttons; and soon afterwards with his brothers, Silas and Samuel, Henry opened a small fac- tory in Waterbury center where they carried on business for over a decade. In 1802 Silas Grilley joined the firm of Abel Porter & Company, the predecessor of the famous Scovill Manufacturing Company, in which he participated for about five years until he sold out his interest and moved his activi- ties to Fulling Mill brook. There in a tiny shop on the South branch he resumed metal button-making. Several years ear- lier a group of six or seven men of the neighborhood, appar- ently impressed at the profitable future the Grilley enter- prise seemed to offer, had organized the New Haven and Baltimore Company, bought of Jared Byington the site of his smithy, and built their button factory just east of the old Hickox grist mill. They did not begin manufacturing until 1808, perhaps because they did not have money enough to equip the shop after building the long flume from the dam half a mile upstream. But once started, the partners, or some of them, continued operations for nearly twenty-five years, providing experience to the men working there and, by the busyness of the plant, encouraging other men to venture into the field.
One hundred and fifty years later the buttons made in these first American shops were to become collectors' items, a special treasure trove for the antique fancier. But in 1800, before men had learned to make and seamstresses to use hooks and eyes, snaps, or zippers, buttons were an essential part of dress. The convenience of buttons and buttonholes, in place of the ties and lacings of the Middle Ages, in turn was to be overshadowed by the utility of concealed metal fasten-
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ers. But before the Civil War buttons served not only as fasteners but also often as decoration-wooden or bone but- tons for workclothes and underwear, brass or silver for dress coats and uniforms. Makers in Waterbury elaborated designs for their finest metal buttons, sometimes turning out com- memorative sets, such as the beautiful gold ones presented to Lafayette in 1824 on his second visit to this country, or the Log Cabin buttons produced in 1840 in honor of President Harrison. So the button-maker was both manufacturer and craftsman, combining in his products utility with artistry.
By 1825 six new button shops had sprung up along the upper reaches of Fulling Mill brook. Even the eighteenth century grist mill was converted for a time to button-making. Wooden buttons, tin buttons, lacquered buttons, buttons of brass, mother-of-pearl, bone, ivory, vegetable ivory, and later cloth-covered and silk-bound buttons-all had their day. Some makers bought their material from Waterbury brass founders; Anson Smith got the ivory and bone for his prod- ucts by teaming over the hills from Meriden comb factories pieces of ivory and bone too small for combs; manufacturers of wooden buttons used the wood of the laurel and ivy bushes covering the hillsides near the stream. Only two of these eight shops continued button-making into mid-cen- tury, and neither employed any great number of hands. But it was buttons that launched the men of the Fulling Mill brook region upon their manufacturing careers. Once the dams, flumes, and water wheels were built, even destruction of the shops by fire could not discourage the owners. When they rebuilt or remodelled the factories, they frequently turned to other lines. But not until steam power made the brook's water power inadequate were the wheels on Fulling Mill brook to cease turning.
The fever of button-making never spread in comparable degree to other sections of Salem, although Milo Hine made buttons in his Straitsville shop before he embarked on hoe- manufacture, and one other shop on Beacon Hill brook was
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started in 1828. When in 1824 Silas Grilley and Chauncey Lewis acquired the water privilege for "as long as grass grows or water runs" and built the first dam to use the power of the Naugatuck river itself, they began on button-making. But they soon sold shop and power rights to Sylvester Clark, the clockmaker. At a later date Jesse Wooster as a side line made some metal buttons in Naugatuck center.
Only less important than the button manufacturers in making Salem's wares known beyond the Naugatuck valley were the clockmakers. Clocks bearing the makers' names- Bradley and Austin, Straitsville; Spence and Wooster, Salem; Sylvester Clark; or R. Ward-for years were peddled by packmen through western Connecticut and New York State, and because of their excellent time-keeping, early established a fine reputation for Salem clocks. The oldest clocks, twenty- four-hour time-pieces, had wooden works, the later eight-day clocks brass works. All were of the weight-driven type. Espe- cially valued for the various original improvements in the works were Sylvester Clark's shelf clocks, which he turned out in numbers before 1835. Below Long Meadow brook near the river stood the Ward shop, little more than a shed on the edge of the Ward farm. Richard Ward and his sons, alone of all the Salem clockmakers, carried on their clock- making into the 1840's when machine-turned gears made unprofitable hand-made works. Until then Richard's sons, Lewis and Lauren, peddled the Ward clocks through the Connecticut hills. Subsidiary to clock manufacture was the painting of clock faces and stamping out of metal hands, both jobs done in the neighborhood.
Table forks were another of the Yankee notions for which Salem earned a name, won chiefly after 1813 by Martin Stevens' tempered forks and slightly later by Amasa Good- year's round-tined steel forks. The Goodyears, father and son, deviated from the Salem system of selling through ped- dlers by opening a store in Philadelphia in 1826 where Charles had established contacts as a younger man serving
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an apprenticeship to Rogers & Company, the Britannia-ware makers. Charles marketed his father's manufactures through this first general hardware store in America. Unfortunately accumulating debts induced Charles to release the good- will and patent rights to the steel fork business, and so his father was obliged to turn to other lines.
Meanwhile other Salem shops were producing for the peddlers' packs mousetraps, tin pans and kitchen utensils, small brass castings, metal eyelets, and pocketbooks. Elihu Benham had a substantial tannery on Beacon Hill brook as early as 1808, and rawhide whip and pocketbook manu- facture naturally followed. Several men were making pocket- books before 1830. About 1840 one enterprising man started a shear shop on Beacon Hill brook, and a year later Lyman Bradley and George Beecher undertook on a small scale manufacture of pocket knives in an old building at the west end of the bridge in the village center. For this venture Bradley brought over from Sheffield, England, the first for- eign workmen to come to Salem. A generation later cutlery was to be one of Naugatuck's most successful industries.
But Yankee notions by no means covered all the manu- facturing interests of Salem, as many men, sensing the ready market for heavier wares in the immediate neighborhood, gradually ventured into other fields of industry. On and off from the turn of the century onward one man or another made wool-carding machines, small hand-operated ones for home use or, later, larger power-driven ones for factories. So Edwin Scott about 1801 made cards and carded wool near the mouth of Fulling Mill brook; and forty years later Clark Warner and Loren Isbell converted the old grist mill into a machine shop to turn out both carding machines and cast- ings. In 1835, John Tatlow, a newcomer to Salem, bought the Sylvester Clark clock shop across the river and began building cards and looms. Though attempts before 1830 to produce linseed oil and paper in Straitsville proved abor- tive, and though wire-drawing, the sure market in Water-
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bury notwithstanding, was early abandoned, manufacture of agricultural implements from 1822 onward grew steadily in importance. For nearly twenty-five years Eben Tuttle forged hoes in Straitsville and finished them in his shop just over the Prospect line, until his business grew so large that he moved to a big factory on Fulling Mill brook. Milo Hine of Straitsville also ran a busy shop, equipped with a trip hammer and manned by six to ten employees. Before 1840 Hine's hoes and pitchforks commanded a good market among the farmers roundabout. Near the site of Hine's shop one Colonel Albert Sperry launched a totally new enterprise in 1839, a malleable iron foundry, the second in the United States. Some six years later the plant burned down and when rebuilt apparently operated on a smaller scale. But the ex- perience gained here by Sperry's iron-workers was to be a great asset to Naugatuck when in the 1850's the Tuttle fam- ily revived the industry.
Beside the men who from mid-eighteenth century on made wares or performed services largely for their near neigh- bors-the men sawing shingles and heavy lumber, the two coopers making barrels, the wagon-maker, the shoemakers, the millers and the owners of cider presses-there were the textile manufacturers. Of all the early industries in the com- munity the woolen mill on Long Meadow brook had a longer history than any other one enterprise. Transfers in ownership and management, expansion and contraction, change in type of fabrics made, burning of buildings and erection of new-all these ups and downs failed altogether to eliminate the industry for over one hundred years. Some time before 1812 a small "clothier" shop had been built along the brook on what is now Rubber Avenue, and here in 1813 Leverett Candee, possessed of a shop equipped "with fulling mill-Kettles-Shearing Machine-press papers- Iron screw and bar, Also Tender bars near said shop," be- gan making wool cloth. In 1820 Candee took William De- Forest into partnership and for two years the two men ran
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the mill together. DeForest kept his interest until his failure in 1846, but Candee's half interest was transferred several times between 1822 and 1825, when the name William De- Forest & Company was adopted.
For the next twenty years DeForest assumed responsibil- ity for management of the mill, bought additional land, se- cured more water power, and erected new mill buildings. The finishing shop at the lower end of the brook was sup- plied with power by diversion of the Naugatuck river from above the dam built by Grilley and Lewis in that first ex- periment in use of the main stream. DeForest added satinet manufacture to his line of woolens, probably in the thirties after the cotton factory in Cotton Hollow provided a local source of cotton warp. Satinet, a cheap fabric made by press- ing wool fibers into cotton cloth, had a great vogue for some years, but its lack of wearing qualities doomed its makers to trouble as soon as more substantial materials could be bought at low prices. Certainly satinet manufacture did not prosper and in 1846 DeForest & Company collapsed in bankruptcy, reportedly with a heavier indebtedness than any firm in New Haven County had ever piled up before.
Still DeForest's enterprise was notable as the first of a new kind in Salem. Textile mills required numerous hands and Massachusetts mill-owners had established the tradition of employing girls gathered together from the countryside round about. Following the example of Francis Lowell and the Waltham cotton spinners, DeForest built a boarding house where the young women working in his mill could be housed and supervised. Here was a departure from local cus- tom which was not repeated until in the 1850's one of the more prosperous button shops on Fulling Mill brook fol- lowed suit. There is no indication that DeForest's scheme caused any stir in the community, but it served to indicate that the village was soon to be caught up in a more strictly industrial mode of life than had obtained in the first years of the nineteenth century.
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With the building of Milo Lewis' cotton factory in Cot- ton Hollow in 1833 the new order of things was accentuated. Milo Lewis, small of stature, wiry, with a thatch of reddish hair that always stood on end, was a figure of boundless en- ergy. Labelled the first "shrewd business man" of Salem, Lewis appeared to be interested in making money as well as cotton warps. Doubtless informed of the profits Massachusetts cotton mills were accumulating in the 1830's, Lewis deter- mined to use the power at the mouth of Beacon Hill brook to turn cotton spindles and create a fortune. The two-story, red-painted factory was topped by a belltower whence at 6 o'clock every morning the bell sounded the beginning of the long day's work. Like most shops in the township, the mill was later destroyed by fire, but not before it had subtly contributed to changing somewhat the pattern of industrial life here.
Varying DeForest's scheme, Lewis boarded his help in the neighborhood at rates set for women at $1.25, for men at $1.50 or $1.75 a week. Whether the differential was deter- mined by appetite or rank in the mill is hard to tell. With his male employees he entered into formal contract when he engaged them. Typical is the following:
This agreement made and entered into this 5th day of February 1841 between Joel Andrus on the first part and Milo Lewis on the 2d Part witnesseth-
That said Andrus agrees on his part to work for said Lewis in his cotton mill Two years, from the first day of April 1841 to the first day of April 1843. Said Andrus agrees to tend the Picker and take care of the Picking room in Said Lewis Mill as directed by Sd. Lewis or his overseer. Said Andrus is to conduct himself in a Gentlemanly manner toward Sd Lewis & his overseer and all per- sons in any way connected with the Cotton Mill and is to perform all his duties faithfully especially the oiling of any part of the gear or Machinery that may be committed to his care & is to studdy to make himself useful to his employer by an attentive dilligent habit of business and endeavour to excell in the department of
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Picking. Also Sd Andrus agrees to Ring the Bell and make the fires for the space of time above mentioned at such times as the Regulations of the Mill require. Further Said Andrus agrees to use his influence in favor of said Mill and the maintenance of all the Rules and use his influence to promote the same course of conduct in others connected with sd Mill-and also to pay a Re- spectful Regard to the Sabbath by the habitual attendance on some place of public worship. Sd Andrus also agrees that in case the business should make it necessary he will quit the picking room for some other department of the business that may be as- signed him by Sd Lewis or his overseer, and should it so happen that said Lewis should be obliged to stop his work at the Mill on account of misfortune or hard times this contract is to be null and void.
Said Lewis on his second part agrees to pay to Sd Andrus for the faithful performance of all the duties as above described for the space of two years from the 1st day of April 1841 the sum of Nine Dollars a month-Eight Dollars a month for the first year from April 1st 1841 to April 1st 1842 and Ten Dollars a month for the second year or from April 1st 1842 to April 1st 1843.
Signed day & date as above Milo Lewis
as witness our hands for Sam'l J.Lewis Joel Andrus
Where $120 a year was looked upon as an adequate wage for an experienced workman, we can comprehend that $20,000, the owner's capital investment listed in 1845, was an enormous sum. It is also easy to see that the wages paid to the eight men and fifteen women employed at this time were a small item compared to the $23,500 estimated as the value of the product manufactured annually. Admitted that interest rates were high, how, with reasonably shrewd purchase of raw cotton and a little adroitness in marketing his warps, Lewis was able to accumulate a fortune becomes no mystery. Still in any appraisal of the first industrialists of those days it is essential to realize that without the capital that Lewis and others were so successful in building up the
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later developments of the community must have been greatly delayed. Money was ready to invest in new enterprise when the time was ripe. Without it Naugatuck's evolution might have been different.
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