USA > Connecticut > New Haven County > Naugatuck > History of Naugatuck, Connecticut > Part 8
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hung so low over whole communities in the United States as in those bitter years.
But the cost in suffering and emotion was by no means all. To care for the families of men gone off to war was an ob- ligation no one wished to shirk. By 1862 the town had voted to give a $300 bounty to every man who volunteered for the army and renewals of this award in 1863, increased to $340 and then to $500 in 1864, piled up indebtedness. Curiously enough to us today, accustomed to the provisions of the 1940 Selective Service Act, in the Civil War the man who hired a substitute for himself, if he were drafted and unwilling to serve, received the bounty, not his substitute who went off to war. The selectmen had to borrow some $22,000 to finance these bounties, a considerable burden of debt for a town whose whole cost of government previously had been only a few thousand dollars a year.
Meanwhile, every-day life in the town had to go on. Tax collectors collected taxes, contractors improved roads and maintained bridges, selectmen made decisions, spent money to repair the first "sidewalks"-cinder, or dirt paths, or oc- casionally tar walks-and supervised all public affairs not specifically assigned to other town officers. The schools car- ried on. Men planted and harvested their crops or produced in their shops the goods the government or individuals would buy. Church societies met; pastors preached to their congre- gations; men prayed and hoped for the end of the war.
But true to the pronouncement of Scripture, the town found that its poor it had always with it. Public provision for the helpless poor was dictated not only by considerations of humanity but also by state law, and division of Water- bury's responsibilities with Naugatuck had been carefully mapped out when the General Court incorporated the new town. The stern attitude of the early eighteenth century that forced persons likely to be "town charges" to remove from the neighborhood before they had to be admitted as
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residents had given way gradually in Connecticut before more humane laws regulating settlement of newcomers. But in addition to people long resident in the community who, through misfortune, old age, and illness, could not support themselves, new arrivals from Europe in the 1850's had be- gun to swell the "pauper" rolls of every manufacturing vil- lage.
The greater readiness of towns and cities to undertake the support of their poor was an advance over the Puritan posi- tion of a century before, when poverty and misfortune was regarded as a judgment of the Lord with which men need not interfere. Still, the frequent use of the humiliating term pauper shows how far the point of view of the mid-nineteenth century is removed from present-day concepts of social re- sponsibility. Skilled artisans from the old world-power- loom operators, Scottish paper makers, Sheffield or Rhenish cutlers, Birmingham iron workers and foundrymen-were welcomed eagerly, even imported by contract into expand- ing industrial communities. But the unskilled immigrants, who laid the railroads, dug the canals and ditches, and car- ried on the heavy labor of building cities and mill towns, were another matter; for their poverty was often extreme and, if the father were stricken, a tribe of helpless, small children and an ailing, overworked widow might fall upon the town for support.
Naugatuck, fortunately for itself, before 1860 or indeed before 1870, was not a big enough place or firmly enough established as a manufacturing center to attract more new- comers than it could assimilate. The Irish, the English, and the Germans who came in the first thirty years of the town's life found occupation and quickly became as fully self- supporting as the descendants of the first proprietors. But Naugatuck's town fathers needed to look only a little afield at the influx into New Haven and Bridgeport, Waterbury and Meriden, to realize that the burden of poor relief might increase overwhelmingly as Naugatuck grew and that better
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provision than boarding out the town dependents was wise. Beginning in the late fifties citizens in town meeting debated the question of buying a town farm, only to vote it down whenever the proposal was introduced. Again and again they appointed Committees to report on "some better and more humane way" to provide for the town poor. But before 1881 the end result was always continuation of the original scheme of boarding out the completely helpless and paying grocery and fuel bills for families who could partially maintain them- selves.
Yet the matter obviously rested heavy not only upon the community's conscience but also on its purse. "Pauper" costs rose year by year, from the days in 1850, when appropriation of the dog-tax fees plus other paltry sums met the expense, to nearly $6,000 in 1879. In that year a committee reported that there was reason to believe that pauperism in the town was destined to increase steadily for some years to come and that purchase of a poor farm and work house was an obvious econ- omy. Waterbury had declared her poor farm to have proved the only feasible means of meeting Waterbury's problem and recommended that its neighbor follow that example. And in 1881 Naugatuck took action by purchasing a 110 acre farm in Millville. From that time to this the town farm has been the home of the town poor. The land was fertile enough to enable the inmates to raise foodstuffs that covered about half the costs of running the farm; after repair of the old sawmill on the place, some additional saving to the town resulted from cutting timber on the farm. Financially the poor farm was a sound investment. Able-bodied inmates were put to work on upkeep of roads from time to time and so further reduced the costs of the town for their support. Kindly administrators appeared to have kept their charges reasonably well provided with the physical necessities of life, and as happy in spirit as the old and disappointed and weary can be.
In the eyes of some citizens, immediately connected with
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the growing burden of poor relief was the increase in the liquor traffic. As early as 1845 the Connecticut General Court had instructed towns to appoint agents to regulate and restrict the sale of wines and liquors, and Naugatuck had complied. Since public opinion for generations had frowned upon intemperance, and periodically pressure had been brought by the churches upon tavern-keepers to desist from the sale of "ardent spirits," the liquor problem, as such, had been non-existent in Naugatuck before the middle fifties. Not more than five places in the whole township sold liquor before 1854 when Connecticut adopted the Maine law, and in those five excessive drinking was apparently not common. Yet at some time during the late fifties or the sixties, the saloon, the "curse" of American cities, appeared in Nauga- tuck.
In 1869 a petition from a group of townspeople suddenly projected the issue at a town meeting. According to the peti- tioners, the unrestricted and intemperate use of intoxicants had become so prevalent in the town "at all times and under all circumstances" that it was an everyday occurrence to find drunken individuals quarreling and disturbing the peace. The citizens assembled were shocked into creating a committee of ten to carry out the Sunday closing law and to prevent unlicensed sale of liquor. They urged all voters to abet the committee, thereby, as the town records state, "res- cuing our fellowmen from drunkards graves." At the same meeting the town decided to build or rent a town lockup and buy five pairs of handcuffs and shackles to be kept when not in use in the Town Clerk's office.
But law enforcement was not to be achieved by town votes and committees, no matter how zealous. The sale of strong drink, both licensed and illicit, continued, and as the sev- enties passed into the eighties the town's annual vote on licensing showed the drys losing ground steadily. To have ex- pected working people in a manufacturing community like Naugatuck in the late 1880's to accept a pattern of life greatly
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different from that of other manufacturing towns would be unreasonable. The saloon of the 1880's, as of the 1900's, was the working man's club. In the absence of other social center and other forms of amusement, it was logically the focus of sociability for many respectable men, much as the country store had been a generation or more earlier. In spite of the occasional hue and cry of local reformers, headed by a branch of the Women's Christian Temperance Union, there is no evidence that Naugatuck was notably "wet"; though drink- ing went on in licensed saloons and elsewhere too, the town could not be labelled grossly intemperate.
Possibly it was the increase in drunkenness in the decade following the Civil War that inspired the town in 1874 to appoint a special constable to police the center. Town con- stables had been elected yearly from the town's first begin- ning, but a special police to patrol the streets was a new departure. Yet it is testimony to the orderliness of the com- munity that it existed for twenty years with no "police" and for several more with but one. Installation a few years before this time of street lamps, gas and oil, at the ends of the bridge in the center and at other "suitable points," lamps which were to be lighted every evening "from early candlelight to eleven p.m." except when there was a moon, must have eased the duties of the first patrolman. Construction of the New York and New England railroad into Waterbury brought a good many outsiders into Naugatuck in 1880 and resulted in the addition of a special constable "to preserve the peace." Still Naugatuck through most of its existence as a town man. aged with a minimum of policing, and a uniformed police force appeared first in 1890.
But Naugatuck was growing, and what sufficed in the fifties, sixties, and seventies could not meet the needs of an expanding community whose manufacturing interests were beginning completely to overshadow all other. Long before townspeople as a whole recognized the changing character of their town, as early as 1867, a few voters presented a
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petition to transform town into borough, but it brought no action for twenty-five years. Yet it was increasingly clear, as the factories grew and working people came pouring in, that Naugatuck was outgrowing a town government geared to a semi-rural mode of life. Among the first signs of realization of this fact was the decision to build a Town Hall. Four and a half years from the day in 1878 when the citizens in town meeting voted to erect and furnish such a building, the Town Hall, located opposite the green across from the Con- gregational church, was ready for use, equipped with its own water supply, sewage system, and gas lighting, offering a hall in its upper story capable of seating some 850 people, and laid out on its first floor with offices. Naugatuck, filled with civic pride, could now see itself in the role of a devel- oping mill town.
During the decade of the eighties other changes marked a new awareness that the home of the rubber shoe and rubber glove and clothing industry of the United States could not indefinitely continue to make shift with country town serv- ices. Fire hazards, looked upon as unavoidable in midcen- tury, loomed larger and larger as investment in expensive mill buildings and machinery went on. A "bucket brigade," formed of men who, on the sound of the church or factory bell, hurried to the scene, was rarely able to save a building or salvage more than odds and ends of furnishings. In 1883 The Goodyear's India Rubber Glove Manufacturing Com- pany took matters into its own hands and purchased some fire fighting equipment, to the use of which individual sub- scribers were also entitled. The town dedicated $100 a year to this fund in order to have available that much protection to the new Town Hall and the center bridge.
But five years later it was obvious that such an arrange- ment was inadequate, and, when the Naugatuck Water Com- pany was formed, a town fire department was also estab- lished. With the purchase of a fire engine and hosing and erection of a Fire House Naugatuck could hope to promise
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property holders some degree of safety. It was high time. Loss of mill buildings had occurred at such frequent in- tervals in the earlier years that shopowners had been obliged to accept the hazard as an unavoidable danger, inherent in the risks of manufacturing in Naugatuck. But as other towns and cities developed relatively efficient fire departments, the disadvantages of carrying on business in a locality that could offer none became apparent.
Naugatuck's specific aspirations to being a manufactur- ing town were plainly proclaimed in 1884 when the voters in town meeting set up a committee to invite manufacturing establishments to settle in Naugatuck. The necessity of hav- ing definite inducements to offer, beyond beautiful scenery and reasonably good rail connections with New York and other markets, was brought home two years later when towns- people learned that other towns were bidding for The Good- year's Metallic Rubber Shoe Company. That company's purchase of the Tuttle Manufacturing Company property, with evident intent to expand its plant by building new units there, promised enlargement of Naugatuck's place in New England industrial life. If the company moved or even built a separate plant elsewhere, Naugatuck would lose potential development by that much. Might such loss both discourage new manufacturing ventures from coming and induce other established concerns to move?
The answer, the town felt, lay in lowering taxes. The tax rate was not high, usually fifteen mills on the dollar, quite as low as in most places. But to persuade the Rubber Shoe Company to undertake its expansion in Naugatuck, the town voted to abate the taxes on the projected new plant by evaluating the property at a nominal sum. Citizens put them- selves on record as wanting all manufacturers to stay in the town and to enlarge their businesses here when possible.
This definite commitment of the town to a program of industrialization had several consequences, some probably of more permanent importance than anyone in 1886 could
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have guessed. For the moment it spelled a series of public undertakings to give Naugatuck and her industries all the advantages that other places could provide-a fire depart- ment, a police department, street-lighting on a comprehen- sive scale, health supervision, a good water supply, telephone lines, fine schools, and low tax rates. Some of these services depended upon organization of private enterprises. The first telephone lines were laid in 1879 under the auspices of the Naugatuck Telephone Company; the Naugatuck Water Company was a privately owned concern which built its reservoir in 1888 in Straitsville and piped water to mills, houses, and hydrants as fast as mains could be laid; the Naugatuck Electric Lighting Company, launched in 1887, enabled the town to install arc lights on the main streets.
Supervision of public health, on the other hand, had to rest with the town, and unpleasant were the conditions the first committee reported in 1889. A Board of Health had been appointed seven years before, but its activities were nominal until outbreaks of typhoid, scarlet fever, measles, and whooping cough called attention to the lack of sanitation in the growing town. Rules establishing quarantines of contagious disease, ordering periodic disinfecting of all out- houses and privies, and forbidding dumping of offal and garbage on brook and river banks or vacant lots were only partially effectual; appointment of a salaried health officer in 1892 marked the true beginning of a public health pro- gram. So the town debt mounted, but Naugatuck was putting itself into the category of progressive manufacturing com- munities.
The school system was a special problem, and in one form or another was to remain so for a hundred years. The district system, set up in Salem with the forming of the ec- clesiastical society, carried on over through the 1840's with- out challenge. While many people sensed the inadequacy of the ungraded district schools, particularly for pupils seek- ing advanced work, no one launched a campaign to alter the
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scheme until 1850. Then the whirlwind struck. A young lawyer, S. W. Kellogg, recently come to Naugatuck, found himself upon the Board of School Visitors. Having a sketchy legal practice and great interest in the public schools, Kellogg took his duties seriously. The conditions he discovered in the eight district schools of the town were appalling. No district had money enough to build a decent schoolhouse. Some schoolhouses, Kellogg asserted, were not fit for stables. Children were crowded into rooms originally designed for half the number of pupils they had to accommodate by 1850, and, save in the Straitsville school in a district of shrink- ing population, grading did not exist. Boys and girls from four to twenty years of age were herded together to recite and study all in one room. Scandalized at this state of affairs, Kellogg consulted with leading men in the town and then enlisted the help of Connecticut's first State Superintendent of Schools, Henry Barnard. Barnard, a man of great distinc- tion and wide experience, arranged to come to Naugatuck to look over the situation at first hand, and promptly de- clared that the only remedy was to consolidate several of the school districts and make one good graded school.
But opposition to the proposal was bitter. Whether resi- dents in each district believed that they would be losing precious privileges of autonomy, whether they feared higher school taxes, or whether they merely fought change from a system that had served in Connecticut for two hundred years, today we cannot tell. Kellogg and a few warm supporters of the innovation at length carried the day and five districts, the Center, Lewistown, Partridgetown, Union City, and Pond Hill, were combined into the Union Center School District, leaving only the three outlying districts, Millville, Middle, and Straitsville, independent. The Union Center District now had money enough to establish a high school and to erect a new building for a graded school.
The new schoolhouse, built at the far end of the village green between the two churches and facing Church Street
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and the river beyond, opened its doors in the fall of 1852. The high school occupied the upper story, the secondary and primary departments the lower. The high school espe- cially was an immediate success. It met a keenly felt want of ambitious boys and girls who formerly had to choose between a private school and the difficulties of study amid the con- fusion of an ungraded district schoolroom. A competent principal, assisted by a teacher who gave full time to the high school courses, awakened latent intellectual interests in the students, some of which found expression outside the classroom. Two rival debating or literary societies sprang up, girls as well as boys participating, and Friday afternoons children of the lower grades, as a great privilege, were al- lowed to listen to the oratorical contests. In 1855 high school students published a literary sheet, The Stray Leaf, not ex- traordinary for its literary quality, yet indicative of unusual enterprise. The town itself was to have no newspaper for another twenty-two years. And a school library, enlarged year after year, was a great asset. The quality of the teach- ing together with the fine esprit de corps that developed in the high school soon made it known in the vicinity as a school of distinction. Of the 106 pupils enrolled during the first year, eighteen came from neighboring towns.
Unhappily, for reasons now obscure, the union of all but the remote districts did not survive the 1850's. Its chief proponent, S. W. Kellogg, had left Naugatuck and no one else arose to stem the tide of reaction. About 1856 Union City withdrew, though the withdrawal was not formalized until 1867. In that year Pond Hill followed suit. Thus the town was plunged back into a regime of independencies from which neither town nor borough was able to extract itself for nearly seventy years. The Center school was left stronger than it had been before 1851, but the lack of centralized planning, the loss of centralized financial control, and the general dispersal of effort that followed had adverse effect upon all the schools. The urgency of the pleas, renewed at
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intervals by the Board of School Visitors, to abolish the district system altogether shows that the men most familiar with the Naugatuck schools considered the reversal of policy of consolidation unfortunate.
Union City proceeded to establish a graded school of two "departments," in 1873 extended to three, later to four, the fourth by a confusion of terms locally labelled a high school. Otherwise only the Center had graded schools. So the oppor- tunity for all Naugatuck schoolchildren to benefit by a uni- form system was lost until 1922. Still the Center, by far the largest and most thickly settled district, succeeded in main- taining a fair standard. The first flush of enthusiasm over the Center high school subsided after Union City withdrew in the late fifties, and the Civil War also cast its shadow upon the school. Boys who had formerly prepared there for college were drawn into the Army, and in the winter of 1861-62 only ten boys were enrolled in the classes in mathematics and mechanics, formerly popular courses. For some months in 1863 the high school was closed altogether. But in the face of all difficulties, serious effort to keep a high level of education in the schools during the grim, distracting years of the war succeeded better than the teachers dared hope.
The chief problem Naugatuck encountered in every dis- trict before 1890 was getting children to attend school. Statistical records antedating 1857 are few, but from that year onward the sorry fact emerges that school attendance was meagre, on an average only about two thirds of the children entered in some terms, at times scarcely half. When enumeration of all children between the ages of four and sixteen began to be entered carefully, in order to benefit by the state funds distributed to towns in proportion to the number of schoolchildren in each community, the difference between the numbers enumerated and average attendance became still more shocking. Parents might reasonably wait till a child was five or six years old before sending him to school, or, if they were impoverished, might need to put
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him to work when he was fourteen. But this obviously did not account wholly for the differences between enumerations and registrations or average numbers attending.
A campaign of parental education to stress the need of parents' enrolling their children and then seeing that they attended regularly was started in 1860 by the town's instruct- ing the selectmen to seek out and admonish families who were remiss. But it was an uphill fight. In 1863 out of 582 children in the town, 335 were entered in the schools, and average attendance stood at 287, 48 per cent of the number who might be receiving schooling; the next year the per- centage dropped to 40, a decline attributed to the increased activity in Naugatuck's factories where children went to work in defiance of the state law requiring at least three months of schooling in every year for all children under fifteen years of age. Four years later still the report came that a large proportion of the children of school age in the town were employed in factories and not attending school even for three months. When the Board of School Visitors undertook to visit every manufacturing establishment to investigate, they declared all factory owners cooperating with the schools; the fault lay with the parents. Yet when the country-wide depression of 1873 reduced factory employ- ment, there was no improvement in school attendance. By 1873 Naugatuck stood 131st among towns of Connecticut in this respect; attendance in the Center averaged less than half the registrations, in Union City only one third! Bands of boys roamed the streets, ridiculing attempts to force them into schoolrooms, destroying property and-a specially se- rious charge-disturbing the horses standing in the horse sheds!
Appointment of a town patrolman helped to lessen tru- ancy and threat to send habitual truants to the State Reform School may also have been effective. Foreign parents, at first resentful of interference with their right to do as they would with their own, in time realized the importance of complying
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