USA > Connecticut > Hartford County > Bristol > Our Yankee heritage: the making of Bristol > Part 12
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Josiah Peck was the first ticket agent. The station was to be on the cast side of Main Street, where that thoroughfare climbed steeply to Center Street, as yet the only cross street. It had only three small shan- ties and upper Main Street had no houses, but everybody knew the railroad would do away with the North side stagecoaches and pro- vide a business center where new stores, industries and houses would
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H & NHRR
"THE COMET" - A WOOD-BURNER AND FIRST ENGINE TO COME TO BRISTOL - 1850 (Vault, Bristol Public Library)
THE MAKING OF BRISTOL
be built. Seymour hastened to put up a business block.
Bristol was divided into a series of small villages, each with its own little center, the North side, South side, Fall Mountain, Compounce Lake, East Bristol, Forestville, Red Stone Hill. A number were served by penny post carried in large tin boxes by a messenger boy to At- kins's store at the foot of Divinity Street, Barnes's store near Foster's north tavern, and J. R. Mitchell's clothing store near the river.
No community can achieve spirit- ual unity and meaning without an impressive civic center that har- monizes and symbolizes man's basic religious, educational, economic and governmental interests. Early New Cambridge had achieved this with Federal Hill, but in spite of Bristol's fine progress, this had been lost in the rapidity of its industrial growth. Perhaps the railroad would serve to tie the community together in a new way.
Certainly its coming that year of 1850 was properly celebrated by the Bristol bands and many flags - thirty stars now, although several brand-new flags already had thirty- one, for California was to be ad- mitted to the Union any day.
The unpopular Mexican War was over. A great empire of new terri- tory had been added. The nation now stretched to the far Pacific - as intended by Connecticut's early charter - to the purple Puget Sound, to the Golden Gate of San Fran- cisco, to the tawny shores of San Diego. In less than a hundred years, the United States had crossed the continent. It had grown from a small strip of coastal land to the fifth largest country in the world.
When gold was discovered in '48, quite a few Bristol people, including George Bartholomew, had rushed out to California, across the plains or around the Horn. One clock- maker at the train celebration had already returned via Panama, and in spite of brushes with armed bandits, had brought back $3,000 in octagon gold slugs strapped around his mid- dle. He came back to a city that was now making more than 200,000 clocks a year.
Here at the railroad terminal this day of June 1, 1850, George and Polly - no longer young - watched the first engine, a wood-burner, 'The Comeť' with shiny new funnel stack, come chugging in from its trip along the Pequabuck. And so new wheels rolled into Bristol.
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»13 brass, war AND prosperity
YOUNG Elisha Niles Welch worked at the old blacksmith bel- lows in the shop on West Street to provide the necessary blast for the small cupola - 'just a porridge poť' people called it. This was a crude way to reduce iron, but make it the Welch foundry did. The mass of metal turned white as silver, and Elisha wiped his sweaty face with the sleeve of his jacket, getting his breath again before he helped draw off the blooms or metal bars. The molten metal threw off stars and cooled through every color of the rainbow. It was hard, hot work that kept his eyebrows singed off and his face peeling.
He had vast new pride in his task, for yesterday, Sunday, February 7, 1830, he had reached twenty-one, and his father George had made him a full-fledged partner. He was a businessman now, already married, a child on the way, and he set his sights high above the old 'porridge
pot' to the opportunities ahead. The Welches, newcomers from Chatham, before that from Rhode Island, had come to Bristol in 182€ to start the West Street foundry. Elisha's mother, Zelinda Niles Welch, once a schoolteacher, had died two years ago, and his father had married Thalia Wildman, daughter of the former Baptist min- ister.
On his birthday, as usual, Elisha had gone with his wife, Jane Buck- ley, down West Street through the light snowfall to Wildman's Baptist Church on the Pequabuck to hear the new minister, Reverend Henry Stanwood, preach. Already the Welches had made many friends among the Baptist congregation. A large share of the new clockmakers, with whom the Welch foundry did business, were Baptists.
No family was more ardently Baptist than the Atkins, out in force this Sunday, parents and ten broth-
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THE MAKING OF BRISTOL
ers and sisters. Generations back, Elisha was distantly related by mar- riage to the mill-owning branch of the Atkins - the Adkins - who had run the Pequabuck mill near the Barnes tavern. 'Priesť' Irenus, closely associated with George Mitchell, was the most striking of the present Bristol family. He was married to Eunice Beckwith, and one of his brothers had married Irene Botsford, daughter of the the South side schoolmaster. A sis- ter, Salvina, was married to Dr. Merriman on the hill; another, to one of the Upsons. Polly was the wife of George Mitchell.
Elisha and Jane talked with George and Polly about the new church. Mitchell proposed starting a church library.
By hard work and enterprise, Eli- sha and his father had already done well making bells and weights for clocks. These were sheathed in brass, so they had learned how to work lead and copper, tin and zinc, as well as iron. Mostly they traded their products for finished clocks which they sold to traders such as Mitchell or Barnes.
They took twenty long mirror clocks from Samuel and Ralph Terry on the Pequabuck in exchange for 4,400 bells and got other clocks from the Bartholomews, Birge and Ingra- ham. Elisha told his father he wanted to go to Pennsylvania and sell them himself.
Elisha traveled steadily after that, sometimes with his brother Har- manus, till the latter set up the trad- ing business at Bristol Basin. Often Elisha traded the clocks for scrap metal, which he brought back to Bristol by team. When all the clockmakers turned to brass clocks, after 1837, the new demand from the Ives, the Jeromes, Ingrahams, and Boardmans for metal parts kept the Welch foundry going day and night. It was high time to expand the old foundry. Elisha's father pulled out of the business and told his son, "You go ahead as you wish."
Elisha got Harvey Gray, a carpen- ter from Southington, who had learned a lot about metals, to come into the works. Gray put in capital and the Atkins metal concern near North Main Street was absorbed. They brought in anthracite coal - the first ever seen in Bristol - to fire the furnaces and were able to make many more specialized items.
The big need of the clock people was for brass. Copper was always in short supply.
"If we could get copper close by," Elisha told his friend George Bar- tholomew, "we could start a real brass foundry like those in Water- bury and Wolcottville."
They looked over Luke Gridley's abandoned copper mine in North Bristol. The water that filled the old diggings was tinged a bright emerald green.
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"It looks promising," said George.
He leased land from Abel Yale and others and dug a seventeen- foot-deep test trench. The varie- gated vein, copper, sulphur, iron and silver ore between granite and sandstone, was so rich, about 70 per cent copper content, it needed only to be trimmed with a hammer to go into the smelting furnace. He shipped it to England and more than got back his costs. Greatly en- couraged, in 1837 he organized the Bristol Mining Company, getting a wealthy New Jersey mining man and the Bristol clockmakers, Harvey and Erastus Case, to back it.
The concern dammed the west branch of Poland Brook in Burling- ton and started sinking a 240-foot shaft with horizontal drifts at dif- ferent levels. The enterprise helped the Welch foundry, which was asked to do special forging and ma- chine work. Other enterprising men sank shafts along the same ridge as far as the southeast slope of Federal Hill. They found copper, but not on a profitable scale.
The mine used many Irishmen who had worked on the canal and had settled on Red Stone Hill in a section called Dublin Hill. Many others now moved to North Bristol and Burlington - the Sullivans, Cunninghams, Critchleys, Collins, Fitzgeralds - in a village called Skibereen, after the southern port in County Cork, Ireland.
The workers demanded time off, with pay, to make the trip to the Catholic Church in New Britain. When this was refused, they went on strike - Bristol's first strike. The mine superintendent settled the trouble by arranging with Father Luke Daly to come from New Brit- ain to say Mass at the mine, usually at Mr. Riley's house. Father Daly had crosses placed on the fences, but this upset some non-Catholics so badly, it was deemed prudent to remove them. At other times he held services at the gristmill or at the Seventh District schoolhouse.
The building of the railroad brought more Catholics to Bristol, who settled in the center, and Fa- ther Daly transferred services to Michael McGowan's house on the South side, on Queen Street and at Gridley Hall, across from the sta- tion. By 1855 about two hundred Catholics were attending Mass. Land on Federal Hill was purchased from Titus Merriman, and a small but beautiful church - St. Joseph's - with a single tall pointed spire was put up that year.
The local mine promised to make it feasible to set up a good brass factory. Some brass had been made in small shops for many years, and the fair-sized Langdon foundry had been started on Water Street or Riverside Avenue at the Pequa- buck. Hooker and Goodenough
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ORIGINAL WORKINGS AT BRISTOL COPPER MINES (Vault, Bristol Public Library)
BRASS, WAR AND PROSPERITY
ran a small foundry near the North side bridge. In 1843 Lester Good- enough, an employee of Chauncey Boardman, started a shop at 77 North Street to make clock trim- mings. Soon he teamed up with Asahel Hooker to turn out brass. They bought up iron and brass waste from clock trimmings, sepa- rated the iron with magnets and re- cast the brass. But Bristol, making more clocks and using a larger share of the brass from the Naugatuck Valley mills than any other city in America, needed a big modern foundry.
Elisha Welch watched the oxcarts pull up West Street toward the In- graham factory, loaded with coils of the shiny yellow metal. To a leather-jacketed driver, who had halted to rest his animals, Elisha re- marked, "That must be a hard pull over from the Naugatuck."
The teamster was working for Israel Holmes, the founder of America's infant brass industry. Elisha Welch had a long talk with Holmes about starting another foundry in Bristol. He explained all the advantages. "Clocks and brass belong together," insisted Elisha.
"There's a lot in the idea," said Israel Holmes thoughtfully.
Though a quiet modest man, who spent his free time writing poetry, Holmes had always been active and always ready to take a chance. He
persuaded a Waterbury button con- cern to send him to England to get men and machinery to make their own brass, which would give them a bigger profit.
The rub was, British law forbade export of foundry equipment and emigration of brass workers. After extraordinary adventures dodging British police, Israel Holmes man- aged to ship over machinery and smuggle out die-sinkers, gilders and burnishers - some of them in wine kegs. In spite of being a marked man, he returned to England two times more and brought over cast- ers, rollers, wiredrawers and tube- makers and soon got a real industry going in Waterbury.
Holmes fell in with Welch's idea. The Welches were good metal workers; they could start a brass foundry all right. A confidential financial report showed their enter- prise was on firm footing. "The one man Elisha N. Welch is enough to guarantee its full success."
Holmes made a proposition. "We'll need $100,000. We have to have a good plant from the start."
That was a lot of money. Every new business needed capital, and older concerns were trying desper- ately to expand.
"I can get some Waterbury men to put up part of it," added Holmes.
"The clockmakers here should be interested," suggested Welch. "I'll talk to them."
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FOSTERS TAVERNS
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FOSTER'S TAVERN (from Bristol Fashion, by permission Bristol Brass Corp.)
BRASS, WAR AND PROSPERITY
Early evening, April 3, 1850, in- fluential citizens of Waterbury and Bristol drove to Foster's Tavern on Farmington Avenue. It was still the city's most handsome hostelry and served fine food.
Sixteen men gathered around the table. Eli Terry Junior came from Plymouth, Jonathan Clark Brown, 'The Plunger,' from Forestville, and a leading banker from Waterbury.
"This brass company will be a good thing for all of us," Elisha was telling Samuel B. Smith, a business partner of Chauncey Goodrich.
Both had been working for Brown, but they secured capital from Elias Ingraham and the rights to his twin steeple-type case, and set up for themselves. They now had four factories, on Brook Street, East Main, and two on Stafford Avenue - turning out 15,000 thirty-hour and eight-day clocks a year.
Brewster and his partners, Elias and Andrew Ingraham, who had the big plant on Race Street, were all great clockmakers. Brewster was finding trouble getting the right kind of brass for his springs. The report on Brewster and Ingraham's read: 'Good no doubt. Make twenty to thirty thousand clocks annually and pay very well.'
Edward L. Dunbar, maker of clocks, clock parts, pistols, wire, springs and hoop skirts, was pres- ent. His standing was high.
John Birge was also at the tavern
dinner. He made excellent 'Steeple on Steeple' one- and eight-day wagon-spring clocks nicknamed 'Puffin' Betsey' because they bore a picture of a smoke-throwing, fun- nel-stack engine.
Elisha Manross of Forestville was eager to come into the new brass enterprise. The leading clockmak- ers were using his pine cases. After making wooden clocks for Chaun- cey Boardman, in 1840 he founded Manross and Wilcox (later Manross, Prichard and Company) to make metal clocks. In 1845 he bought out his associates and manufactured patent-spring eight-day brass wag- on-the-wall clocks in a new factory he put up on Church Street along- side the Pequabuck. His output was now 20,000 a year, and he was one of the biggest users of brass and brass springs.
He and his son Newton, back from getting a doctorate at Goettin- gen University in Europe, had de- vised a machine for cutting garnets.
"We are going to put jeweled parts in our clocks for smoother run- ning. No one has ever done that before."
Everybody at the big dinner table respected Chauncey Boardman for the capable way he had swung over to brass movements and had ridden out the depression. His patents on 'Equalizing and Retaining Power- Spring Brass Clocks' and a fuzee mechanism made for good running.
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THE MAKING OF BRISTOL
He was turning out about 30,000 clocks a year and was anxious to find new investments.
The report on Ebenezer Hendrick of the Hendrick, Hubbell and Com- pany read - 'easy in circumstances, pays well, gives no bank notes, owns real estate and personal property, all clear.' The most important mak- ers of marine clocks in the world, they now also made bank-lock clocks, and thirty-hour and eight- day lever and pendulum move- ments. A good setup - capital, business ability, wide technical skills.
The waitresses had taken away most of the dishes when Elisha struck his fork on a glass for atten- tion. He was a big man, and under his broadcloth frock coat could be seen the swell of muscles from the days when he had worked in the foundry. He had a massive cra- nium, forehead bald, extraordinary deep-set intense eyes, a strong straight nose, and his great puff of beard made his jaw seem bigger and longer. The men present knew that all the Welches were able business- men, real builders, with many inter- ests. Elisha's brother Harmanus had left Bristol Basin to engage in large enterprises in New Haven. Another brother, Henry, had big cotton mills in Waterbury and Plain- ville.
Elisha introduced Israel Holmes as "the greatest brass man in the
world. If he comes to Bristol, it will mean great things for the town and the clock industry."
Holmes's demand for $100,000 made the group gasp. "We'll put up the best plant ever built, and we must have enough backlog to see us through the first difficult years. This venture is going to succeed, it is going to pay big dividends."
He promised to organize a com- pany to make tableware. "We will make German silver-plated ware and roll that German silver at the brass mill."
In the morning, all the Bristol men agreed to subscribe to stock. The papers were drawn up and ar- rangements made to get a charter. The Bristol Brass and Clock Com- pany had been started.
Seventeen days after the tavern meeting, Holmes bought the neces- sary land - the old Ebenezer Barnes tract on the Pequabuck and on east. He turned the famous Barnes-Pierce tavern into a boarding house for the sixteen skilled workers he brought up from Waterbury - key men, such as Rufus Sanford, smuggled out of England, and Sylvester Platt, an expert caster. Wages ranged from 67 cents a day for ordinary workers to a little over $2.40 for finer artisans.
Operations started on April 9, 1851, when the first order for 784 pounds of brass came in. Birge,
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Peck and Company put in the first Bristol order. Two Bristol foundries asked for more than a thousand pounds. Brewster soon discovered that only the Bristol mill could make really good 'spring' brass. Smith and Goodrich and Brown of Forest- ville began getting nearly all their brass from the local works.
Even so, the going was rough. The subscribers were slow to take up their options, so it became diffi- cult to meet payrolls and buy mate- rials. Holmes had to dip deep into the till of his Waterbury company to save operations.
He called the directors together. Stock not paid up within sixty days would be cancelled. Since some could not meet this requirement, the more prosperous clockmakers were able to buy up majority control. Holmes was forced out, and Elisha Welch became president.
Power was provided by an over- shot water wheel. During a bad drought that threatened operations, Welch installed a two-hundred horsepower steam engine. For years teamsters were busy hauling four-foot logs to the big yard across from the mill to keep it going.
The brass was made in large cru- cibles, the zinc melting at 700 de- grees, the copper at 1800, and cast in iron molds, two-foot slabs four to eight inches wide, three-quarters of an inch thick. To get them down to the desired thinness they had to
go through ponderous chilled cast- iron rollers from twenty to twenty- five times in a muffle furnace - heated cherry-red, then allowed to cool. After each rolling the brass had to be annealed. Some slabs were pressed out thin as paper, from fifteen to two hundred feet long and coiled into rolls for ship- ment.
Bristol Brass prospered. Within two years the company earned al- most $60,000, nearly 60 per cent on the original investment. But Elisha Welch plowed all the money back into plant expansion and even in 1855, stockholders received their first dividends, not in cash but in the form of a 56 per cent stock bonus.
With Harvey Gray, Elisha also expanded his earlier foundry to make machine tools and more spe- cialized clock items. Over the next few years all his undertakings pros- pered.
It was part of the Bristol pattern. New industries were causing it to grow fast. As capital flowed in, more and more workers were get- ting jobs.
As promised, Holmes had started the tableware factory - Holmes and Tuttle.
Other new industries started. In 1851 the Bristol Hardware Corpora- tion began making curry combs, fer- rules and tools. The following year, the Forestville Hardware and Clock
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Company was set up. The Forest- ville Machine Company and the Ames Shovel Company, in which Alphonso Barnes and Theodore Terry were interested, started mak- ing shovels, spades, hoes and farm tools. George Bartholomew, who had left the copper mine venture to join the California gold rush, was back, and with his son Harvey S. started to manufacture stock braces in their old Grinding Shop on the South side of Warner Street.
Near there John Humphrey Ses- sions from Burlington left the Win- ston Brothers wood-turning shop in North Bristol, where he had been working for four years, and in 1854, with Henry A. Warner as partner, set up his own shop, powered by a water wheel on a stream leading from a pond on Maple Street. They produced wooden parts for clocks, furniture knobs, escutcheons, carved wood handles and drawer pulls. Their plant soon burned but they took larger quarters on Maple Street.
Two Savings Bank and Building Associations were organized, one in Bristol, one in Forestville. The Bris- tol concern, headed by the amazing versatile Tracy Peck, Latin scholar, town clerk, and businessman, put out half a dozen stock issues in 1853 and 1854 - a total sale of $658,200. Colonel Edward L. Dunbar topped the first subscription list with a $5,000 purchase. John Birge put in
$4,000. Irenus Atkins, Noble Je- rome, Elijah Darrow, Elisha Welch, Lester Goodenough, Noah Pomeroy, the new clockmaker on Race Street, and other important industrialists gave their support.
The Forestville bank, with Dan A. Miller, treasurer, took many mort- gages and loaned large sums to clockmaker Jonathan C. Brown.
The Bristol development most promising for the clock industry, be- sides the brass foundry, was spring- making. The first Bristol shop to make clock springs - a big step for- ward to free the trade of clumsy weight-driven movements - was started by Harvey Wright in 1830. Kirke, Brewster and other Bristol clockmakers also pioneered with springs.
Edward L. Dunbar, who was making clock parts, clocks and pis- tols 'entirely new in design and fin- ish,' went into the spring business and in 1847 he and his associates paid $500 for the springmaking rights of Silas Terry of Plymouth, who had hit upon a tempering proc- ess using charcoal and melted tal- low. They agreed not to impart it to others and never to sell springs to Chauncey Jerome, the most pow- erful competitor of the Terrys.
Dunbar's business prospered, and in 1851 he purchased from the Barneses and Elijah Darrow more land on Union Street near the corner
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of South Street, including the Barnes carriage factory, and a third interest in a South Mountain reservoir partly in Wolcott. Dunbar was then em- ploying about thirty people.
But the man who really knew how to make steel springs was John Pom- eroy, who had developed an en- tirely new tempering process. He kept his secret for some years, work- ing on it in his own shop, then turned it over to the new A. S. Platt and Company, in which he became a partner. Filbert and Julius Wright, sons of Harvey Wright, Bristol's first independent spring- maker, were also part of this con- cern. It leased, then purchased, a shop on Main Street from Thomas Barnes Junior and leased water rights from Alphonso Barnes. About twenty men were employed.
By Pomeroy's method, the scroll- shaped clock springs were heated by pine wood on plates in a semi-muf- fle type furnace chamber, then quenched in fish oil and tempered in a molten lead bath. One of these Pomeroy pine-burning furnaces was still in use at the Wallace Barnes plant as late as 1914.
Before this development, French and other imported springs cost a dollar or more. Platt brought this down to about seventy-five cents. By 1853 the price dropped to seven or eight cents.
In that year the Connecticut Busi- ness Directory carried the Platt
Company's ad for eight-day and thirty-hour clocks, and made-to-or- der springs 'of the best material,' mainsprings, steel cylindrical and 'flat helix hair-springs.'
A Platt workman, taken on Sep- tember 1, 1854, was Wallace Barnes, son of Alphonso. Wallace, then twenty-seven, was a restless soul, who had been in various business ventures, first in the stores of Thomas and Alphonso, then in his own store in Winsted. He married Elizabeth Jane Fuller. Three years later he formed a partnership with his father and brother to run the Barnes store on the northeast corner of Main and South Streets, but he never got on well with his father, and pulled out to cut round and rec- tangular glass for clock doors. He worked for Dunbar about six weeks, then went to work for the Platt con- cern. He contracted to make spring- driven alarms at 2 cents apiece. He notes in his diary that seventeen op- erations were necessary. Jerome of New Haven took about 1,200 a week.
As the 1857 depression ap- proached, Wallace went without payment for many months. When the firm went under, he had to take a note for $113.89. He went back to cutting glass. Early in 1857 he ar- ranged with Julius Wright, still at the Platt factory, to make hoop skirts at the rate of $7.50 a thou-
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