USA > Connecticut > New Haven County > Naugatuck > History of Naugatuck, Connecticut > Part 7
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Of the circumstances that hastened this broadening of mental horizons, probably none was of greater importance than the establishment of a post office in Straitsville. The opening of the Straitsville turnpike in 1801, a highway from New Haven to Litchfield maintained at the expense of the turnpike company, immediately brought this section of the Naugatuck valley into regular communication with wealth-
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HISTORY OF NAUGATUCK
ier and more sophisticated places. The coach stop in Straits- ville made it the logical location for the first federal post office, though later it was moved to the center. Delivery of letters for Salem now need not wait in New Haven for any- one who might be traveling inland, and, though it was still costly to mail letters, confidence that they would reach their destination within days, instead of weeks or months, quickly served to multiply the number dispatched. The closely writ- ten sheets that have come down to us may not at first glance suggest any notable change in the outlook of the correspond- ents. The letters of John Hull, for instance, written over a period of ten years between 1829 and 1839 to his relatives in Salem Bridge, are formal in tone. After elaborate explana- tions of why he has not written more frequently, his letters contain long analyses of his religious struggles plus exhorta- tion to pray for him and bear with him in his doubts. He was in time ordained as a minister of the Episcopal church. Scrupulously detailed news of friends and relatives is still largely in terms of their spiritual or bodily health, with no allusion usually to their worldly affairs. But the reports cover a wider and wider area as time goes on, so that people at home in Salem hear of friends in Savannah, Georgia, or in Ohio and have brought before them brief vision of life in distant places.
A second influence that affected Salem was the custom, well established by the 1830's, of having an exchange of visits with relatives who had moved elsewhere. There were few families from which some member had not moved to western New York State or beyond. Daughters married men who were beginning their lives in the West, and younger brothers or cousins made occasional visits to these somewhat distant homes and in return expected long visits in Salem. Aunt Sally or Cousin Reuben jolted in by wagon over the turnpike or came by stagecoach to stay for a week or a month and then, upon returning home, often carried off one of the younger children of the Salem family to spend some time in
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new surroundings beyond the mountains. Probably most children in Salem Bridge had opportunity at one time or another to sample life elsewhere. Today when communica- tion is infinitely faster and it takes little effort to keep in touch with distant relatives, few Americans know much of what happens to their cousins; human interest and emotion subside when there ceases to be any challenging difficulty to overcome. But a hundred years ago everyone knew the general circumstances of his second cousins or third, no matter how widely the family might be scattered; and in a pleasant sociable way a kind of patriarchal regime lived on into midcentury.
Indications of the closer contacts with the outside world may be found not only in the greater diversity of subjects covered by books bought for the Salem Library, but also in the founding of the "Salem Lyceum." Discussion clubs or "Lycea" were soon to be a common-place in New England villages, but Salem's launching its group in 1839 shows that it lagged little behind more sophisticated places. Fifty-four men, young and old, signed the constitution and so pledged themselves to participate in the weekly debates on the ques- tion set for the evening. Only the weather was allowed to interfere. Unlike the Library Association or the Masonic Lodge, any person might join by signing the constitution and paying twenty-five cents in dues. "Any Person," how- ever, referred only to males, and ladies, while occasionally invited to submit anonymous compositions to be read, were never invited to attend the meetings. The Lyceum had a vig- orous career for some five years, only to disappear from view suddenly in 1844. Later endeavors to revive interest proved futile. Still during its life the Lyceum played its part in directing men's studied attention to political issues and phil- osophical problems. We may smile at some of the topics dis- cussed: "Is the possession of a bad Wife a greater misfortune than the loss of a good one?" "Is Infidelity more to be dep- recated than religious fanaticism?" "Which exerts the great-
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est influence in the formation of Character-Male or Fe- male?" But the tariff, the proper role of Abolition Societies, the wisdom of banks' suspending specie payment, capital punishment, and similar themes were also thrashed out, if not settled, and the Lyceum debates gave its members whole- some intellectual exercise.
For all the increase in knowledge and extending of the geographical horizons of the community, from every con- temporary source we have brought home to us the precari- ousness of life and health in those days. The reports in family letters of ill health of various members of the large house- holds are less surprising than the writers' calm acceptance of its inevitability. Consumption or "debility" was simply the lot of some persons and their deaths were recorded not with- out grief, but without protest. No widespread epidemic com- parable to the "Great Sickness" of 1749 invaded Salem in the early nineteenth century, but rare was the household that did not bury a child or grownup every few years. The list of deaths in the Congregational church records makes sorry reading; for no one today can fail to suspect that many lives could have been preserved by greater knowledge of disease, and the heart is touched by realization of the cost in human suffering of raising a family, when perhaps only five out of eight children could be expected to live to matu- rity.
In the eight years from 1822 to 1830 Amos Pettingill, the Congregational pastor, entered in the church book not only the fact of each death in the parish but the cause as well. These data reveal a greater exactness in diagnosis than one might expect from country doctors of that time. Medical training was sketchy even in the few "medical schools" then existing in the United States, and licenses to practice medi- cine were of necessity issued to men with meagre knowledge of physiology or anatomy. While experience and shrewd ob- servation of symptoms might lead a doctor to make correct diagnoses, knowledge was too limited to permit his prescrib-
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PARTRIDGE
MILLVILLE DISTRICT NO. 4
TOWN
UNION CITY DISTRICT No. 5
UNION CITY SCHOOL.
MILLVILLE SCHOOL 1838
FIRST MEETING - HOUSE T
SOUTHWEST DISTRICT SCHOOL /1836
( DISTRICT DISSOLVED 1836)
FIRST SCHOOL HOUSE' 1773
POND HILL SCHOOL 1790
T ST. MICHAELS 1803 -1832
83
7
DISTRICT NO. 1
DISTRICT NO.6
.
CENTRE
MIDDLE DISTRICT No.3
MIDDLE DISTRICT SCHOOL 1778
'DISTRICT No.7
1
STRAITSVILLE SCHOOL 1825
ยท
DISTRICT LINES AS GIVEN IN NEW HAVEN COUNTY ATLAS, 1867
.
LEWISTOWN SCHOOL 1779
.
.
SCHOOL HOUSE SITES ACCORDING TO WILLIAM WARD'S LOCATIONS AS DESCRIBED IN WARD PAPERS.,
HISTORY OF NAUGATUCK
ing medicines or treatment to cure many ailments; and sur- gery before the discovery of anaesthetics had to be confined to amputations. Pettingill's list of fatal diseases included lung fever or consumption, dysentery, diabetes, and many cases of what he labelled tersely "fever," and "Meridan fever." Perhaps "fever" covered the familiar contagious dis- eases of today, scarlet fever, measles, or diphtheria. With neither state nor town health boards in existence, there was of course no quarantine regulation, and indeed its uses could not have been imagined before Pasteur's discovery of the germ origin of disease. "Meridan fever" was probably some type of undulant fever, a frequent and serious malady when pasteurization of milk was unknown. Only homely remedies applied with common sense by doctor and housewife could have prevented the worst ravages of contagion.
In spite of the high death rate and the emigration of families during these years, the population of Salem grew enough to make more schools imperative. In addition to the six districts created before 1800, two others were set off be- fore 1844, the Straitsville District in 1825 and the City Dis- trict in 1830. The scheme adopted for a few years at the end of the eighteenth century, of having one tax collection for all the schools in Salem, was short-lived. At least from 1800 onward till 1851 each district was autonomous, appointed its own school committee, tended to the upkeep of its own building, financed its own program, and supervised the teaching of its children. Citizens in every section gave their time freely to serving their districts, and their efforts were far from perfunctory. A sketch map (p. 83) shows the approx- imate location of the schoolhouses in 1840.
The Straitsville District was cut off from the Middle Dis- trict when the expanding prosperity of this southeasterly section of the township suggested the likelihood of its be- coming permanently Salem's business center. In keeping with the progressiveness of its manufacturing and trading interests, Straitsville inaugurated the first graded school in
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EVERY-DAY LIFE IN SALEM BRIDGE
Salem. A two-story schoolhouse accommodated scholars who came from some distance to take advantage of the excellent teaching. The grading was not exacting by modern standards, but the teachers maintained clear distinction between the "higher department" and the lower. Stiles Peck, a whip manufacturer of Bethany, taught here every winter for many terms and rumor reported that the perfect discipline of his classes was related to the ready supply of his factory prod- ucts. The City District, like Straitsville, the result of a growing community, was sliced off from the Center and Pond Hill Districts to serve the children of the families about the lower reaches of Fulling Mill brook. The name Union City for this region of shops and mills came into general use about this time.
In the nearly half century between 1800 and the granting of full independence to the town of Naugatuck a number of changes took place in the other school districts also. The Gunntown or South West District was dissolved in 1836 and the Millville District school was built a year or two later somewhat nearer the center. In nearly every district larger schoolhouses were put up, each still built with only one room, but with box or pot-bellied iron stoves now replac- ing the open fireplaces. The old houses were sold to the high- est bidder for use as shop, shed, or barn, and the sight of the building being dragged off on wooden rollers by teams of oxen must have given hilarious satisfaction to the boys and girls who had but lately spent weary hours within its walls.
As the nineteenth century wore on schoolmasters be- came fewer and schoolmistresses more numerous, just as was true in all New England. That gifted and conscientious teachers were willing year after year to struggle with the often ungrateful task of instilling knowledge into the heads of their pupils for the sums of ten dollars a month, or even less, testifies both to the teachers' devotion to their calling and to the standard of living common in the simple, hard- working community of those days. Probably also the meagre
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HISTORY OF NAUGATUCK
salaries explain the disappearance of the schoolmaster. For men were needed for many jobs; women for few outside their homes. The pay was, to be sure, often higher for the winter term than for the summer, and board for schoolmaster or schoolma'am was provided by one family or another at a figure set by the school committee, $1.50 a week at most for a man, $1.25 a week for a woman. Yet as time went on the district school committees were unable to hire teachers properly qualified to instruct the increasing number of schoolchildren, particularly those requiring something be- yond the most elementary education.
The field of instruction, however, did become steadily broader. Geography-formerly omitted as a distraction from the more essential study of arithmetic-English grammar, and finally history were added to the three R's and spelling. While the old geography books with their astounding state- ments might be a source of joy today to the better-informed twentieth-century child, the scholars of one hundred and forty years ago found this study dull. In Nathaniel Dwight's Geography, published in Hartford in 1795, and perhaps used in Salem somewhat later, we find:
Q. Give a concise description of the Giages and Annians.
A. The first inhabit a part of the Congo coast; the latter live in the Macaco. They are cannibals. They kill and eat their first born children, and their friends who die are eaten by their relations. In Macaco there is a market in which human flesh is sold, although other meat exists in plenty. They esteem it a luxury, and it is said one hundred fifty prisoners or slaves are daily killed for the kings table.
But even United States geography was full of odd inaccu- racies. One book declared:
The Alleghany mountains are in some places immense masses of rock piled one above another till they reach the height of more than 10,000 feet above a level with the ocean.
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Adams' Geography, published twelve years after the reports of Lewis and Clark's expedition were available, states:
The White Mountains are the highest, not only in New Hamp- shire, but in the United States.
Manifestly failure to master geography lessons would not have left the Salem schoolchildren wanting in sound educa- tion, though later texts, such as Olney's, were of course more correct.
Olney's National Preceptor and Easy Reader, Webster's Spelling Book, Roswell Smith's Arithmetic and Grammar, were used in some of the district schools. Other districts re- lied for arithmetic upon Daboll's Schoolmaster's Assistant. History was apparently taught from Advanced Readers and books such as The Columbian Reading Book or Historical Preceptor, Collection of Authentic Histories, Anecdotes, etc. No two schools in Salem necessarily used the same texts, and the teachers in each district had presumably considerable latitude about what to teach and how.
Discipline, on the other hand, was a universal require- ment. There were no whipping posts in the Salem district schools, but ruler, stick, or whip was ready to the teacher's hand, and used when needed. One room could scarcely con- tain mischievous strapping boys and girls of fourteen or fif- teen, together with small children eager to emulate the bigger ones, without occasional explosions. The career of any teacher unable to control the boisterous spirits of his or her charges was short. Yet sometimes a schoolmistress by sheer force of character was able to dispense with corporal punishment. Reminiscences of Miss Tabitha Castle's regime in the Lewistown school of 1804 describe a serene atmos- phere where thirty boys, thirteen of them over twelve years of age, and twenty-five girls, all grouped in one room, learned and recited their lessons without altercation.
In the late 1820's a first "select" or private school was
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HISTORY OF NAUGATUCK
opened by the Congregational pastor. After his death in 1830 it was carried on by his son and daughter to prepare students for college or special fields of work. During the winter of 1835-36 a Yale graduate taught a "select" school in Daniel Beecher's house, and, succeeding this, several years later an- other private school ran for a time in the upper part of De- Forest & Company's wool finishing shop. About the same time the Naugatuck Female Seminary opened its doors. Its founders came from Troy, New York, where they had at- tended Emma Willard's famous seminary. Their prospectus offered an elaborate variety of subjects: Ancient and Modern History, Algebra and Euclid's Elements of Geometry, Paley's Moral Philosophy, Natural Philosophy, Chemistry, Astron- omy, and other branches of "higher learning," while for extra fees students might study Music on Piano, French, Latin, Drawing and Painting, and Use of Patterns. But the charges, $6.00 a quarter for the regular upper schools courses, and $1.00 to $8.00 a quarter for every special course, were beyond the purse of most families here. The boarding school made no lasting impression on Salem, and it is unlikely that the "females" who entered learned more than a few lady- like frills.
But need of more advanced schooling than the Salem dis- trict schools could offer was beginning to be felt in the com- munity before 1840. A private school conducted in 1842-43 by a graduate of William and Mary College showed the townspeople what inspiration vigorous teaching could sup- ply to older children, and the debating society which flour- ished that winter derived much of its strength from the boys studying at the select school. Naugatuck as a separate town was to be seven years old before achieving a high school.
By 1844 Salem Bridge, since the opening of the post office in the center in 1834 frequently now called Naugatuck, had grown sturdily. It included within its twenty-eight square miles two churches, eight district schools, two through turn- pikes, several general stores, and more than twenty-five shops
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EVERY-DAY LIFE IN SALEM BRIDGE
and factories. Its people, about 1,730 in number, were hard- working and God-fearing, simple in their mode of life, neither very wealthy nor oppressed by stark poverty. But with the self-sufficiency of New Englanders they wished the fullest possible independence. The petition to be recognized a separate town was the result.
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PART III Naugatuck As a Town, 1844-1893
CHAPTER VII
Public Affairs and Private Life
O N an afternoon in mid-June 1844 Naugatuck held its first town meeting in the open air on the village green, with opposing political groups assembling on the right or the left of the moderator's stand to cast their votes for the first town officers. No scene probably could de- pict more clearly the simple workings of the democratic process. Here on the grass plot between the Congregational and Episcopal churches with no fanfare or wrangling, men elected the town selectmen, the clerk and the treasurer, the constables and grand jurors, and the list of lesser officers: tythingmen, surveyors, haywards, fenceviewers, pound- keeper, and the sealer of weights, measures, and augers. The act of the General Court which, in response to a petition of several prominent men of Salem, set off Naugatuck from Waterbury and included a small slice of Oxford and Bethany, gave the new town one representative to the General Court and provided for division of the towns' assets and obligations for support of the poor, maintenance of bridges, and the like. In October Naugatuck elected Assessors and a Board of Relief-to pass upon protests of assessments-and, soon after, an agent and a treasurer to handle the Town Deposit Funds, money allotted for schools by the state from Con- necticut's share of funds distributed from the federal sur- plus in 1837. The three selectmen received $1.00 a day for compensation when they were engaged on town business, and a tax of six cents on the dollar as entered on the tax list financed town needs for the first years.
For nearly twenty years most town affairs moved along serenely. Realization that the district schools were not meet- ing the requirements of an enlightened, forward-looking
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HISTORY OF NAUGATUCK
community led in 1851 to marked changes which I shall dis- cuss further on, but otherwise, until the Civil War shattered the calm of political life, Naugatuck's town government func- tioned as smoothly as if the village were an isolated eight- eenth century community. Flurries of excitement over na- tional politics, the Mexican War, the compromise of 1850 with the slave states, the tariff, and in 1854 and 1855 the up- surge of the Know-Nothing party with its violent anti-for- eign, anti-Catholic principles, all influenced men's thinking without affecting their attitude toward or participation in lo- cal government. Rental of first one building and then another served to provide town offices. Davidson and Goodwin's building, leased for $35 a year, answered for a time, and later space in the Nichols block became the "Town Hall." Here men of various political creeds carried on their duties as town officers without regard to differences of opinion on larger issues.
One of the first urgent matters facing the community was improvement of highways, a concern of greater importance in the 1840's and 1850's than we nowadays can readily com- prehend. For, in spite of a growing concentration of business in the center and in Union City, farms and shops were scat- tered over the twenty-eight square miles of the town, and the coming of the railroad in 1849 emphasized the desirabil- ity of communication with line and depot in the center. Full- ing Mill brook was still lined with more factories than any other section of the town and finished products, raw mate- rials, and sometimes coal had to be teamed to and from the railroad. Where in 1850 the flat between Hop brook and the Naugatuck river had one house and could have been bought, Henry Baldwin later estimated, for about $500, by 1853 the rail tracks nearby made this land valuable, and its rapid building up necessitated layout into streets and a bridge over to Union City.
As formerly, every townsman was permitted to work out his road tax, ten cents an hour being the allowance for a
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PUBLIC AFFAIRS AND PRIVATE LIFE
man's labor when he supplied only his own tools, twenty cents an hour when he provided his team as well. After 1857 "sewers" or culverts to carry to the river rainwater and seep- age from springs on the hillsides were built from time to time, but a town sewage system had to wait for the twentieth century.
By the time of the Civil War Naugatuck was beginning to have the air of a compact town. Over 400 dwellings housed its 557 families. Church Street was building up southward, and the rubber shops near the old woolen mill and the rub- ber workers' houses stretching along the road toward Mill- ville had already given Rubber Avenue its name. The green was flanked by a new Congregational church with gleaming white clapboards and graceful spire, completed in 1855, by St. Michael's and an Episcopal rectory, and the Union Dis- trict schoolhouse. Along Maple Street, leading from the green to the bridge over the river, rose on one side the sub- stantial brick factory of the Phoenix Rubber Company, on the other the rubber glove shops, while on Water Street, between the west bank of the river and the railroad tracks, stood several stores and houses, a small Methodist church, and the simple frame building which served as church for the Roman Catholic mission. On the east bank of the river Main Street from the hotel and the Culver store near the bridge led north to the shops of Fulling Mill brook and the homes of Union City. On the hillside above the highway stretched the Hillside Cemetery, adjacent to the old Pine Hill burying ground of 1709. Old trees surviving the first clearings for houses and fields shaded streets and roads, al- though along the river itself spring freshets, strong enough to tear away or make unsafe the bridges in some years, stripped the valley bottom of all but a few elms and "button- woods."
Many services which the citizen of the 1940's takes for granted from his local government were not considered a necessary function of a small town before the Civil War.
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Street lights were not to be attempted even at the bridge be- fore 1867, although a gas company, organized in 1862, could have furnished gas illumination. Paved streets and sidewalks did not exist. Fire protection could not be organized until a public water system could provide the water for fire fighting, a lack which cost the town heavily in loss of property before the Naugatuck Water Company was created in 1888. A town sewage system also had to wait for water pipes and mains, and even well-to-do households had cesspools and outhouses. Cis- terns and pumps supplied adequate pure drinking water but, except in two or three homes where owners could afford to pipe water from the springs above their houses and install private sewage systems, piped bath-tubs and plumbing were to remain an unknown luxury until the 1890's.
The Civil War struck Naugatuck a sharp blow. The town was not yet so industrialized as to have its business life greatly shaken, but, like other New England communities, Nauga- tuck felt the shock of war profoundly. Abolitionist sentiment had never run strong here, and most men had clung to the belief that armed conflict with the South, so far from being "irrepressible," could and must be averted. Two hundred and thirty-six men from a town of about 2,400 people marched off from Naugatuck in the course of three and a half years, and many never returned. To the generation that has lived through World War II it may appear to have been cause for gratitude that the "boys in blue" were fighting on American soil and that their families usually could follow fairly closely the battles that Company H of the Connecticut 15th Regiment or other units of local men were engaged in. No careful censorship prevented the families at home from knowing that husbands and sons were lined up at Antietam and Cold Harbor, at Chancellorsville and Gettysburg. But the anxiety with which people waited for news of battles and the dreaded casualty lists was deepened by their partial knowledge. Probably never since has a pall of fear and grief
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