USA > Connecticut > Hartford County > Bristol > Our Yankee heritage: the making of Bristol > Part 11
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KEEPING TIME WITH PROGRESS
prises, in finding a market all over the country for Bristol products, no men did more than Thomas Barnes,
great grandson of Ebenezer, and George Mitchell, son of the early Scotch immigrant.
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الفانيس
B
NORTHWESTERN VIEW OF BRISTOL SHOWING FEDERAL STREET, THE CONGREGATIONAL CHURCH, AND THE OLD METHODIST CHURCH ON THE SITE OF THE PRESENT ADVENT CHURCH (from an original wood engraving in 1835)
»12 THE turning wheel
IN 1834 George and Polly Mitch- ell attended the opening ball at Al- phonso Barnes's new south side hotel across from the snaky split- rail fence around his homesite. Two wings of the hotel, to be used as in- dustrial plants, were painted black with white trim and provided with water power by fifteen-inch square plank flues.
Soon another Barnes hotel on Farmington Avenue was leased to Foster. Most stage lines stopped before its big white colonnades, and along the turnpike now came great herds of Western cattle, blotting out the sun with their dust, headed for the Hartford slaughter houses.
An academy on Federal Hill, started in 1826, was now finished. Near there Daniel Tuttle had opened a wagon shop and did a good business with Bristol folk plan- ning to move West to the frontier. He gave this up and opened a tav- ern. From it a new rival stage for Hartford started three times a week. It took the new road cut east over the mountain crest, and the driver,
Bill Thorpe, the North-side livery stable man, who had been a friend of Candace Roberts, gave his pas- sengers a wild whooping ride down steep Parsons Hill to King's Road, where he turned on two wheels, clipping the tree branches. The schedule was kept - as Tuttle ex- pressed it - 'through heat and cold, through mud and snow, rain and sunshine.'
Innkeeper Tuttle was an orphan whom the Selectmen had bound over as an apprentice to Enos Ives on Peaceable Street. He ran away, but Ives generously gave him a Bible and a new suit of clothes and bound him over to John Birge, with whom he learned 'the glorious art of making wagons.'
A very devout man, for eight years he climbed the 'rickety' tower steps of the old Congregational Church to ring the bell, but was ex- communicated by the minister and church committee for refusing to believe in future divine punishment and warned he would have plenty of trouble at the final judgment seat.
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THE MAKING OF BRISTOL
He answered with a broadside leaf- let. 'Shame on such arrogance and presumption,' he cried to the com- mittee, for falsely 'usurping divine judgment.' Reaffirming his belief in God and redemption, he excom- municated 'the whole church.' But soon he sold out to Chauncey Jer- ome and moved to Ohio.
In the gambrel-roof house next door to the tavern, pewter buttons and tinderboxes were being made. Sulphur matches, discovered a few years before this, had to be labori- ously dipped by hand; most people still depended on flint. The boxes made on Federal Hill had a curved slide top over a steel-bearing wheel pulled by a wound string. The spark lit a wick and by blowing on this lustily one could manage to light a candle.
Across from Dr. Merriman's origi- nal home, Ira Lewis's tin shop still operated at his big two-story triple- chimney house. Near there Dr. Charles Byington, married to Eve- line Barnes, daughter of Thomas Barnes Junior, had his office in a big square house. It had been dragged up from its original site at the foot of the hill by teamster Gad Lewis with half a hundred mules, a feat of real generalship. From there George and Polly Mitchell watched Bristol's Fourth of July celebration - that was in 1838 - the first time real fireworks replaced the usual hand-tossed wire turpentine torches.
Stimulated by the clock industry, all sorts of new undertakings were getting under way. In 1831 Orrin Judson and Lord S. Hills started a casting shop on Union Street near the brook. Another was started on Valley Street. George and Elisha Welch - father and son - had a foundry at West Street, where Meadow Street was later cut through. A lemon-colored pearl button factory appeared on South Street. Edwin Smith began making looking-glass frames near the Je- romes. George Tuttle opened a tailor shop and Alanson Richards made wire tuck-combs. Robert Pierce, who married Henrietta Ives, opened a 'draper and tailor' shop north of Joseph Ives's house. Wil- liam Munson started the first com- mercial bakery, and his 'spic and span' yellow-wheeled bread and cake wagon became a familiar sight on the slanting streets.
New homes, schools, churches and business buildings were being erected. In 1832 clockmaker Law- son C. Ives put up his fine Maple Street house, which he later sold to Jonathan Brown of Forestville.
A West side cemetery was needed, and in 1836 the town-appointed committee - Joel Truesdell, Thomas Barnes and Tracy Peck - bought 3 acres and 20 rods from Richard and Norman Peck for $180.
By popular donations a fine fence was put up around North Cemetery.
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In lieu of cash, Bill Thorpe and others each donated a day's work. William Rich gave fifty cents. John Birge gave seventy-five twelve inch posts and one hundred fifty-six ten inch posts. Others also donated posts.
In spite of the 1837 depression, Bristol's industry continued to grow. At the 'Frog Pond' on the Pequa- buck, Alonzo Warner set up a boot and shoe factory employing twelve men. Across the street Francis Hamlin still shod horses and oxen. An important satinet mill, with card- ing plant, spinning spools and looms, was erected on the north bank on Water Street, later River- side Avenue, to make a smooth wool-cotton cloth resembling satin. Chauncey Ives and Bryan Edward Hooker, whose father had run the South Street fulling mill, were be- hind this. $45,000 capital was pledged.
Two years later, $20,000 capital was subscribed, largely by Chaun- cey and Noble Jerome and Hiram Camp, for a knit-underwear con- cern, the Bristol Falls Company, on the site of the old forge. It was headed by Richard Peck. A new dam, anchored to the rock walls by iron rods, fed water through a side ditch for a sixty-foot drop to the big overshot wheel. But in a few years the business was given up.
Dana Beckwith had a turning and casting shop - 'the old brown shop'
- back of his house on North Main Street near Doolittle Corner - so- called from the butcher shop there - where he produced awl handles for Hartford hardware merchants and made a few clocks. He invented the steel 'gong bell' - soon used on clocks and by firehouses and churches. Millions were sold, but Beckwith had neglected to patent it.
Carriage making, booming in New Haven, promised to be the up- and-coming industry. Vehicles of every kind were needed to span the great spaces of the West and in the fast growing new cities. Alphonso Barnes, a dashing type, who dazzled everybody with his elegant car- riages and fine blooded horses, per- suaded his father, Thomas Junior, that Bristol could rival the neighbor city, and they put up a 100 by 30 foot factory near South Street. The forges were in the high brick base- ment. The bodies and wood work for running gear were made on the first floor. The painters and trim- mers worked on the second. Inter- changeable parts were made by ma- chinery, the first attempt in America to do so completely. Alphonso's popular two-seated charioteer car- riage was painted black or claret, well polished, with white or drab broadcloth upholstery, the metal work gilded or silver-plated.
But the southern market was too closely held by the New Haveners, and in 1843 Alphonso threw in the
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THE MAKING OF BRISTOL
sponge and leased the plant to the Union Manufacturing Company, a 'cooperative' that made and sold clocks on the New York market at cut rates. But the other clockmak- ers combined against it so effectively that by 1845 it was put out of busi- ness.
Part of the slack caused by the loss of the big Jerome payroll was taken up by the Bristol Screw Com- pany, which used the old Jerome Pequabuck site to make cutlery, wire and screws. A few years be- fore, all such products had been made laboriously by hand, now they were made by machinery.
George Bartholomew started a cutlery factory - the ‘Grinding Shop' - on Warner Street in North Bristol. Soon he was able to build the most handsome home in Bristol near his plant, on the brook, in the center of the big triangle made by Jerome Avenue, Warner and Edge- wood Streets. The ornate carving, inside and out, took two years to complete. Later his brother, a com- petent manufacturer, and his father built fine homes on either side. His father used his big cellar as a butcher shop.
Henry Albert Seymour, long em- ployed by Boardman and Wells, be- gan making ivory and boxwood rul- ers on Riverside, the famous 'Ivory and Bones Shop.' In 1851 he put up the Seymour business block on Main Street.
Forestville - thanks to Brown, the Manrosses, Rodney Barnes, Hub- bell, the Terrys and others - was growing too. East Bristol near the old Barnes-Pierce tavern promised to be the main center. Theodore Terry had two places there - the Bit Shop and the Hollister House, which later burned. Expecting a railroad station to be erected at this point, early in 1847 he opened a post office. But both station and post office were eventually erected in what is now Forestville center.
According to the State Assessor's office, by 1845 Bristol had two woolen mills, consuming 106,000 pounds of wool and turning out 125,000 yards of satinet worth $77,- 600. A casting furnace produced 250 tons annually, and there were two small brass foundries. $25,000 worth of machinery was being made in two factories. There were two cutlery factories, two saddle, hames and trunk factories. One hundred and seventy-five pairs of boots and 2,125 pairs of shoes were being made. Local industry was using 1,348 cords of wood, 4,600 gallons of sperm oil and seventy-five tons of anthracite coal.
Only one tin factory was left, but fifteen clock factories were at work, and by 1850 there were at least fifty concerns making clocks or clock parts.
Growing crops and raising of horses, cattle and swine were still
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important. Hay was the most prof- itable crop, then corn and butter. One hundred and seven bushels of walnuts worth $107 and fifty-five bushels of chestnuts worth $75 were gathered.
So many new enterprises made for wider opportunities, better liv- ing, more leisure. They eased hard toil and made more goods available at cheaper prices. Bristol kept pace with America's over-all industrial growth, in some direc- tions took the lead.
The busy town was full of clock artisans and factory workers with money to spend. On the Sabbath they put on tailor-made broadcloth suits, cashmere trousers, black silk- velvet or satin vests and high bell- shaped hats.
They sought new entertainments. In 1833 the first Bristol band was organized. A few years later, a rival group imported an Italian bandmas- ter. One member was 'cornucopiat- ist,' young Wallace Barnes, son of Alphonso. The two bands, soon fa- mous throughout Connecticut, were in great demand for parties and po- litical rallies. They tooted George Mitchell to victory when he ran for the State Senate in 1836; they were much in evidence during the heated Whig-Democratic election of 1840. 'An express messenger in a good roadster with well-greased axles' seized the signed and sealed Bristol
election tally and raced with it to Hartford.
Traveling shows put Bristol on their itineraries. Young P. T. Bar- num's waxworks exhibited life- sized, notorious British criminal Crownelshield committing a gory knife murder. Several years later Barnum staged his 'wild beast' ex- hibit on the vacant lot south of the Brainard-Peck house. He looked at the bustle of Bristol's new industry and invested some of the 18% cent pieces that poured into his till, in the clock business. Later he ruined himself and Chauncey Jerome in New Haven by a big unsound clock merger and went back to taming lions and trapeze artists with vaster success.
Bristol began playing wicket, a version of British cricket. Farmers, mechanics, businessmen, almost everybody, gathered on the Green or in North Bristol to play it. Later, furious contests were staged with New Britain. Those who could not attend gathered in crowds at the railroad station - after that line was built - breathlessly waiting the spe- cial wicket train with its bright ban- ners. Far down in Plainville, the engineer began blowing the whistle, either for victory or lugubrious de- feat.
The game supplied a new name to one part of North Bristol. There were two teams up that way, one headed by Philo Curtis, the other by
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THE MAKING OF BRISTOL
Thomas Lowrey, scheduled to play on the Fourth of July.
Captain Lowrey asked Curtis the name of his team. Curtis, who was working at the Sessions wood-turn- ing shop, picked up a brush and painted Polkville on a bat, after the new Democratic president.
"Then mine will be Whigville," retorted Lowrey, using the name of the Opposition Party. Thereby he created the name of a southern part of Burlington.
Alonzo Warner put up his famous 'Refectory' and tenpin alley on the Pequabuck where he sold candy, beer, peanuts and Munson's pies and cakes.
Older people shook their heads at the frivolity of the younger gen- eration, but religion was not neg- lected. From 1830 to 1837, four new churches were built.
On January 17, 1831, Tracy Peck and Chauncey Jerome called a meeting at the Academy to plan for a new Congregational church. The previous church had become too cramped, and lady members of the congregation protested vehemently against the gallery being restricted wholly to men.
To build a new edifice, leading industrialists contributed good-sized amounts. The biggest single dona- tion - $500 - was made by Thomas Barnes. Clockmakers Chauncey and Noble Jerome, Elias Ingraham and N. L. Birge gave large amounts.
Alphonso Barnes donated $100 and was paid thirty-three cents for Sec- retary Tracy Peck's record book. Tracy got $10 for keeping the books.
Subscriptions totalled nearly $4,000, and the rental of the 'slips' or pews brought in $1,898. Six pews were reserved for those too poor to pay. Girls were to sit in the north gallery, boys in the south gallery, and the choir in the east gallery.
The building was put up by Ben- jamin E. Palmer, who had built numbers of fine Connecticut churches and had just erected the second Baptist Church. Newman Peck brought a load of stone from Hartford for $10.50. Gad Lewis also carted dirt and stone. William Lewis - grandson of Josiah - hauled lumber. He also set out the elm trees around the Green. Alva L. Wooding and Albro Gris- wold were paid for blasting.
Sweetmind Roberts provided 318 feet 4 inches of 'flagging stone' for $39.79. Prince Livingston, the Plainville colored man, who had come with his wife Lily to Bristol to live, was paid $2.25 for raising the studs. Chris Brainard received $69.69 for two box stoves, 3812 pounds of zinc and sheet-iron stove- pipes. Chauncey Ives provided $72.94 worth of nails, glass, springs, etc.
The old church steeple, pulled down by a rope tied to the lightning rod, fell with a tremendous crash.
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The iron weather vane bit into the turf not far from the old red-painted signpost near the schools, and hun- dreds of rusty nails were scattered about, giving trouble to barefoot boys.
Ira Lewis took home part of the newel banister of the old church for the stairs in the back shed of his house that led to the platform where he stored his tinware.
The total amount paid to Palmer was $4,483.20, but this did not in- clude the bell, excavation, grading, a great deal of additional work.
For the official raising, September 2-8, 1831, William Darrow received $1.00 for a barrel of cider, $3.97 for thirty-four pounds of cheese, 65 cents for one hundred 'large crack- ers.' Boardman, Smith and Com- pany provided 5%2 gallons of wine for $6.75. Thomas Barnes got $7.00 for a barrel of ale and $5.50 for crack- ers. However, Tracy Peck noted down piously, "No ardent spirits used."
The dedication was celebrated August 1, 1832. There was fine choir-singing and Chauncey Jerome loaned an organ. In 1835 the church gallery was altered for it, but in 1841 there was a dispute, and he was asked to take it out. For a while a bass viol was played by one of the Ives boys till a new organ could be bought by subscription in 1859.
Samuel Terry made and donated the $110 clock for the new steeple,
but to get a proper bell installed proved a heartbreaking business. The first bell in 1797, to the buying of which Gideon Roberts and other citizens subscribed, was cast by Isaac Doolittle and weighed about 600 pounds. It broke in 1804 and another bell, bought in Massachu- setts, broke in 180S. The third bell, though not well liked, proved more sturdy. By town meeting vote No- vember 3, 1809, it was ordered tolled for all funerals at town ex- pense. In 1831 it was sold to the Burlington meetinghouse.
The bell for the new meeting- house from G. H. Holbrook of East Medway, Massachusetts, weighed 1,764 pounds, at a cost of 31 cents a pound, and the oxcart had consid- erable trouble getting it over the bad roads. Holbrook, who jour- neyed down in person to help hang it, was boarded at George Hooker's house. A great crowd turned out to watch him hang the bell.
But several Sundays later, New- man Peck rang it so hard it broke. It took a month for Holbrook to bring another. The people never liked the tone, so in November they replaced it with a smaller one weighing only 1,245 pounds. This broke the following May. After some delay, Holbrook brought down a fourth one, weighing 1,278 pounds, which he placed in the bel- fry, July 1, 1833. It cracked on July 4 while being rung for com-
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THE MAKING OF BRISTOL
munion. Holbrook's fifth bell - 1,273 pounds - was installed Au- gust 10, 1833. The people never liked it, and were almost glad when it cracked in 1847. A new one from Troy, New York, was hung on May 20. It weighed 1,336 pounds, and the tongue weighed 40 pounds.
Methodists and Episcopalians, now numerous, lacked a place to worship, so the Congregationalists invited them to hold services in the new parish house erected beside the new church. The Methodists, who had been meeting at the West Street schoolhouse, were far from popular and though several prominent busi- nessmen, such as Evits Hungerford and Philip Gaylord of Chippins Hill were staunch Methodists, they had trouble persuading anybody to sell land to them in a desirable location. When they got an offer of a good tract beside the West Street school- house, they routed out a notary in the dead of night to witness the sale before anyone could object. Hun- gerford provided the first lumber from his farm, and the edifice was up by 1837.
The Episcopalians, lying low all during the Revolution, were given legal permission in 1784 to organize a new congregation. The East Plymouth Church, put up in 1795, was inconvenient for Bristol resi- dents, and in 1835 Trinity Church was built on Maple Street.
In 1842 the Millerites, or Second
Adventists, believing the world was about to be destroyed, urged people to divest themselves of all worldly goods in order to enter Heaven. Among those who joined was quarrelsome Asahel Mix, a rich Stafford farmer, with a big red house and red barns on a glacial knoll in the meadows east of Edge- wood.
One day he climbed the big pine tree in his yard, with a rope around his middle. The report spread that he was wearing an 'Ascension Robe' and expected the Lord to pull him up to Heaven. Asahel said angrily he was only fixing his well sweep. He remained the shrewdest cattle and horse trader in Bristol, a salty pic- turesque figure, who acquired a vast amount of property. But religious matters continued to plague him, and revival meetings, often lasting for weeks, were held at his home. In 1863 an ex-Quaker revivalist, who passed himself off as the Holy Ghost, appeared with a group of followers and tried unsuccessfully to persuade Mix to donate his broad acres for a permanent religious com- munity.
Successive waves of prohibition- ism also swept Bristol. 'Cold Water Armies' - a militant semi-secret or- ganization - marched through the streets with banners and singing.
As a boy Charles E. Mitchell often 'tuned it up' for the pledge song of youthful marchers:
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We cold water girls and boys Freely renounce the treacherous joys Of brandy, whiskey, rum and gin, The serpent's lure to death and sin. Wine, beer, cider we detest And thus will make our parents blest. So here we pledge perpetual hate To all that can intoxicate.
People those days were hungry for a better way of life. New indus- try and improved health conditions promised to make such hopes pos- sible. People were hungry for new ideas. There was a keen awareness of human welfare and culture.
The Connecticut Academy of Arts and Science had been formed as early as 1799 and, during the early years of national growth, Bristol citizens took an active part in many useful Connecticut organizations: an Asylum for Education and In- structing of the Deaf and Dumb (1816); Retreat for the Insane, who were previously thrown into prison (1824); the Connecticut Historical Society (1825); the General Hospital Society (1826); the Connecticut Medical Society (1834); the Natural History Society (1835); Botanic Medical Society (1835). George Mitchell helped organize a state- wide literary society.
Ezra Stiles of Yale had started an anti-slavery society in New Haven, perhaps the first in America, soon after the Revolution. In 1838 the Connecticut Anti-Slavery Society was formed, and many Bristol peo- ple were ardent supporters. It
pointed forward to the long struggle for human rights that was to shake the new nation.
The marvel of the age was elec- tricity, which people sensed would soon change their lives in mysterious ways. On October 6, 1849, George and Polly Mitchell took the children to hear a demonstration lecture by S. N. Botsford, a local genius whose head was full of new mechanical wonders. His talk was held at Compounce Lake which Gad Nor- ton, grandson of Ebenezer Norton Junior, had recently developed with great success as a summer resort. As the grand finale, Botsford was to blow a wooden raft to pieces by a submarine gunpowder charge set off by electricity.
The town turned out, making a great show of their carriages and horses. Colonel Dunbar drove up behind his magnificent blacks; Al- phonso Barnes, his thoroughbred dappled-dark grays; Elisha Brew- ster, his sleek bays. Fearful of the effects of the explosion, they hitched their teams a mile away and walked in on foot. People carried umbrel- las to protect themselves against the expected deluge.
Botsford demonstrated and ex- plained electrical batteries, a model of Morse's telegraph and the Morse code. But the gunpowder charge under the lake failed to explode.
A burly farmer shouted they had been defrauded and tried to lynch
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the 'humbug.' Friends rallied to Botsford's rescue. After a pitched battle, the trouble maker was thrown into the lake, and interest was directed toward Dr. Page's Medical Helix, a galvanic battery to give shocks to everybody suffering from paralysis, rheumatism or ner- vous diseases. Soon a Bristol shop was manufacturing shock machines, and a Bristol dentist found it profit- able to tour the country as an 'elec- tric healer.' Electricity, people were told, would cure all human ailments. It was indecd a wonder- ful and hopeful era.
Above all, it was the era of mov- ing wheels. The wheel was man's imitation of the universe itself - without beginning or end - and it lightened all tasks. Many wheels whirred in Bristol those days, and many wheels rolled in and out of Bristol - clock wheels, factory wheels, wagon and carriage wheels. Fast over the horizon werc coming railroad wheels - north and south, east and west, lacing a great con- tinent together. The iron rails pushed closer and closer to Bristol.
When in 1835 a railroad was built from New Haven to Hartford, Theo- dore F. Clark started the 'Telegraph Line' of stagecoaches from the Barnes's South side hotel to Berlin, the nearest stop. For the first time it was possible to get from Bristol to New Haven and back in a single day.
The canal company, unable to withstand such competition, let its waters drain away, and with light- ning speed laid down tracks along the bed - the famous 'Canal Road.' On January 8, 1848, the first train puffed into Bristol Basin where Venus and Ceres had once been moored. The abandoned boats were converted into pigpens, sheds and houses.
Iron rails pushed on to Bristol. The construction work brought in more outside workers. Seventeen of them were boarded at the James Wilcox house for a dollar a week, $1.25 with coffee. Several members of the Pierce family kept the red warning lights lit at night during the construction work through For- estville. The new line crossed the Pequabuck by a bridge not far from the sturdy house that Ebenezer had built in the wilderness so laboriously with such primitive tools more than a hundred years before.
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