USA > Connecticut > Hartford County > Bristol > Our Yankee heritage: the making of Bristol > Part 13
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THE MAKING OF BRISTOL
sand. When he quit in November he had made 40,000. $300 for ten months' work!
One story has it that Wallace took what was due him from the Platt Company in hoop-skirt wire, loaded it into a wagon and set out for Al- bany. There he traded the wire for a store, which he exchanged for a Missouri farm, sight unseen. Re- turning to Bristol he swapped the farm for a blacksmith shop on School Street, which he sold for $1,600, enough to give him control of the closed-down Platt enterprise where a few months before he had worked for wages.
More likely his capital came from the property inherited on the death of his grandfather Thomas. Wal- lace took a quit-claim deed on the entire Platt land, buildings, water rights, equipment and stock, which he then purchased from the bank.
He also bought Wright's equip- ment and good will for $2,013.50 - spring winders, a forming machine, two rolling barrels, a press, twenty- two cords of pine wood, several tons of coal, a lead kettle, coal grates, hardening pans, some English cruci- ble sheet steel, a stock of toy and clock springs. A few months later, from Joseph Sigourney, a Platt sub- contractor, he bought power presses, turning and drilling lathes, wheel and ratchet engines. With these re- sources he teamed up, January 11, 1858, with Edward L. Dunbar, who
put up all his property also, to form the Dunbar and Barnes Company. Each partner put in $2,000 in cash. Julius Wright and John Pomeroy continued as employees.
Soon the demand for hoop-skirt wire outstripped that for springs. The making of hoops grew into a tremendous enterprise that ran around the clock with three eight- hour shifts. This 'monstrous femi- nine fashion, which crowded insig- nificant males into mouselike corners of drawing rooms,' swept the entire country and caused a great upsurge of the metal, wood, wire and textile industries.
The hoops were covered with braid and made into frames to which the skirt was fastened by brass or silvered slides bought from the Waterbury Buckle Company. In 1858 forty braiding machines were purchased, and Thomas Barnes III, Wallace's brother, provided $3,200 worth of braiding equipment and made braid on piece-work con- tract. By the end of 1859 two hun- dred braiding machines were in op- eration. Twenty new foot presses were bought. 149 people were em- ployed and sales of springs totalled a quarter million dollars - not bad for a two-year-old company start- ing with a little more than $10,000 capital.
Dunbar had an outlet agency on Murray Street in New York. Soon
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a second New York agency had to be opened at 13 Park Place, and Colo- nel Dunbar's eighteen-year-old son, Edward B., went down to help out. Two hundred girls there were used to put crinoline on the hoops.
Each shipment of hoops was met by a mob of bawling buyers. Young Dunbar related, "I always sold what we couldn't use to the man who could batter his way atop a barrel and fight off all comers."
New manufacturing space was needed, and 'Crinoline Hall' was built, with the ground floor open to dry wood beneath the spring-hard- ening furnaces. It was formally dedicated on February 8, 1860, with music supplied by the Forestville Spring Band for $45.00.
Though only 15 per cent of pro- duction was devoted to clock springs during those years, gradu- ally springs came to represent a growing share of the business.
Sash, balance, door springs and loom springs were made. Flat coil springs were made for George W. Brown and Company for toy bug- gies and engines. Waterbury con- cerns made large purchases. The biggest Bristol clock accounts were those of Noah Pomeroy and E. N. Welch, about $3,500 each. Manross, Beach and Hubbell and P. A. Glad- win were in the $2,000 a year class. Most clock concerns except Ingra- ham, still using brass springs, bought from Barnes and Dunbar.
When war came it was impossible to get Southern cotton for braid, the market for hoop-skirt wire vanished, and on July 4, 1863, Wallace took over the whole concern, assuming liabilities for $31,000 and giving a promissory note of $11,000. Later in the year, Dunbar took back his former South and Union Street properties. Barnes retained Crino- line Hall, the original Platt property and water rights on Main Street, also five-eighths of the water privi- leges in the South Mountain reser- voir.
Wallace kept on making springs and started a machine-screw plant with his brother-in-law, Rollin Ives. In 1864 spring sales came to $75,000. Planning to process his own steel supplies, Wallace laid in a big stock and built a wiredrawing plant, which he equipped with fire- brick, castings, gears, pillow blocks and brass boxes. But in May, 1866, his properties, buildings, equip- ment, the new rolling mill, all except Crinoline Hall, were wiped out by a spectacular fire. This was a terrible set-back in days of little or no insur- ance. Most of the equipment lost could not be repurchased, but had to be re-engineered and rebuilt. There was no mass production to re- place lost parts. In those days there was no other factory like it any- where except possibly Dunbar's. It was still very much a pioneering enterprise.
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"Mr. Barnes, hoop-skirts are more than a fashion, they are an industry. Colonel Dunbar, Bristol, Connecticut, 1858
CRINOLINE HALL
-
"MR. BARNES, HOOP-SKIRTS ARE MORE THAN A FASHION, THEY ARE AN INDUSTRY." COLONEL DUNBAR, BRISTOL, CONN., 1858. Illustration from A Century in Connecticut, reproduced by permission of G. Fox & Co., in Hartford
BRASS, WAR AND PROSPERITY
No one emerged from the 1857 depression days more successfully than cautious, clever Elisha Welch. He came out on top at every turn. Soundly conservative, always chary about extending credit, when hard times hit, he had a bigger cash back- log than any other manufacturer. If a clockmaker couldn't pay for his brass, Elisha would say, "No, I don't want your note. Give me clocks." To several Forestville manufactur- ers of mechanical toys in difficulty, he said, "Pay me with toys."
He set up a New York store and moved such stock quickly, keeping in a fluid cash condition. When the economic pinch came he was able to buy up the majority stock of Bristol Brass at low prices. When the Holmes and Tuttle tableware com- pany, the 'Spoon Shop,' housed on the site of the old Jerome plant, got into difficulties, Welch merged it with Bristol Brass. Both were now wholly his plants to run as he saw fit.
The satinet mill, which he had helped start in 1837, also had trou- ble. Its product fell off in popular- ity, and to save it, Elisha brought his brother Harmanus back to Bristol to manage it. They turned to making knitted underwear.
Since 1850 this had been done with much success by the Bristol Knitting Company on Pond Street, a concern originally promoted by John Birge, Elias«Ingraham and
others. Ingraham soon withdrew, and John Birge's son, Nathan L. Birge, a restless schoolteacher, who had turned 'Forty-Niner,' took it over. The Birge Company became a major industry. Welch's reorgan- ized satinet mill soon enjoyed simi- lar success.
Welch threw his net over a num- ber of other companies that were having trouble. In 1854 he bought out Elisha Manross's clock works, and two years later, Jonathan Brown's big factory also. Brown's Forestville plant had burned down in 1852 without proper insurance, and his independent outlets in New York and Philadelphia turned out badly. So did the Bristol Clock Case Company, organized by him and other leading clockmakers, which put up a factory near the railroad on North Street. In 1855 Dan Miller of the Forestville Sav- ings and Loan Bank foreclosed on Brown's Forestville plant, and Welch took over. Welch also ab- sorbed the Otis Shop on East Main Street. Frederick S. Otis made fancy pearl inlaid cases that had a great vogue with all the clockmak- ers and the public, but he was caught short in the financial crash.
These mergers made Welch the world's biggest clockmaker, next to the New Haven Clock Company. His control of the basic brass indus- try gave him a great advantage over all other producers.
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Elias Ingraham was mostly out of the picture. In 1852 he and his brother Andrew had split with Brewster and had set up the E. and A. Ingraham Company. They were burned out and transferred their business to Ansonia. That col- lapsed, due to the 1857 depression, and Elias came back to Bristol where he managed to make a hun- dred cases from pine and white- wood culled from the charred ruins. He got financial help, formed a com- pany, and in 1859, with only one helper, managed to make 2,600 cases - a column arch case that proved very popular. The next year he produced 5,000. In 1861, he bought out his silent partners and formed a partnership with his son Edward. His new Doric, Ionic, Mosaic and Venetian designs soon made him the peerless clockcase producer of America. In 1863 they bought the old hardware shop at Meadow and North Main and moved it to the foundation of the burned building. From then on he prospered, made complete clocks, and soon rivalled Welch.
Many criticisms arose because of Welch's absorption of so much of Bristol's industry, but most people felt he was helping the town greatly by reassembling new companies out of the debris of industrial collapse and keeping people employed.
Even after the depression was
over, confidence was not fully re- stored. Increasing agitation against slavery was bad for business, espe- cially as the South was such a big market for Connecticut goods.
Welch was furious at the loud de- nunciations by local people of the Southern slavocracy - men like the temperance advocate Allen Bunnel, the wagonmaker on Divinity Street; Roger Lewis, the gunsmith; and Ab- ner Tuttle, the clock peddler and carpenter. One hot anti-slavery center was H. T. Cook's boot and shoe store. Elisha feared such talk would plunge the country into dis- aster. Sectional strife was already hurting Northern business; civil war could ruin it. If people stopped buying clocks and local factories shut down, Bristol Brass might also go down in ruin.
But Connecticut had voted heav- ily in favor of the new Republican party. Fremont, the first candidate, received a resounding majority. Lincoln got an even bigger vote in 1860. Bristol gave him two and a half times as many votes as Breckin- ridge.
No other state rallied more whole- heartedly to the Northern cause than did Connecticut. When Fort Sumter was fired upon, it threw five thousand men into the front lines within five weeks. Bristol men rushed to the recruiting centers in Hartford or New Haven. There were Bristol men in nearly every
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Connecticut regiment. Newton Spaulding Manross, son of Elisha Manross, began organizing Bristol volunteers.
With dour eyes, Elisha watched the first outfit - Company K - march past his windows at the brass works. In the ranks behind Man- ross were many notable Bristol citi- zens, young and old - such long- standing names as Bartholomew, Blakeslee, Barnes, Gaylord, Hart, Hotchkiss, Mathews, Merriman, Newman, Norton, Peck, Royce, Up- son and Yale. Josiah Lewis Junior carried a gun made by his uncle Roger Lewis; Harvey Gray, Welch's foundry partner, joined up.
Captain Manross's company was rushed to Washington as part of the Sixteenth Regiment, given arms and flung pell mell into the front line in a desperate effort to stop Lee at An- tietam. They arrived on the battle- field without food, except for a raid on a cornfield and an orchard with green fruit, and were caught in a deadly close-up cross fire from stone walls.
"We were ordered to fix bayonets and advance," Lieutenant B. F. Blakeslee wrote in his diary. "In a moment we were riddled with shot." Orders were never heard. "No one," wrote Blakeslee, "had the slightest knowledge of regimental move- ments."
Newton was killed by a cannon ball in the first charge. The loss of
life was frightful. Those not killed were held in foul prison camps where the majority died.
Later recruits fared better. Of Bristol's second volunteer outfit, Company I, led by Captain Burrit Darrow, son of the dial painter, only four men were killed. Darrow was badly wounded.
Few places made greater sacri- fices than did Bristol. The town paid out over a million and three- quarters dollars in bounties to sol- diers and support of their families. No family was allowed to suffer. Large volunteer contributions of food, clothing and hospital supplies were forwarded. Nurses were sent. Thanksgiving turkeys and special Christmas dinners were shipped South. Enormous pride and enthu- siasm were aroused. January 1, 1863, when Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, wag- onmaker Allen Bunnel, whose three boys were at the front, burned a whole keg of gunpowder to cele- brate.
In all there were 387 Bristol en- listments. A good number bought their way out. Around 275 served. On the great West Cemetery monu- ment, with its bronze eagle, dedi- · cated January 20, 1866, the names of fifty-four dead are engraved. The official State List gives nine addi- tional names not on the monument.
Newton Manross's body was brought back and carried in a great
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THE MAKING OF BRISTOL
funeral procession to the Forestville cemetery. A dirge was composed by George H. Mitchell, secretary and treasurer of the E. N. Welch Company. Later, Manross's Am- herst students erected a monument for him. The local G.A.R. Chapter of Veterans bore his name.
Elisha Welch, for all his opposition to the war, which caused him to be labeled a 'Copperhead,' did not fare badly. With his usual ingenuity he rode out all difficulties of the first war months. On taking over the clock companies, he had acquired an enormous inventory that could not be pushed into the market be- cause war and inflation made clocks a luxury few could afford. He rushed big shipments to England where he got paid in gold, then made a double profit by buying de- flated greenbacks with which he could purchase materials cheaply and pay his workmen. A fine war- time contract came to the 'Spoon Shop' to make spoons, knives and forks, for the Boys in Blue had to eat if they were going to fight. Soon his foundry boomed. The need for brass for munitions more than took up the slack.
Nor could his knitting mill keep up with rush orders. Elisha emerged from the war many times a millionaire, Bristol's greatest in- dustrialist.
He proceeded to expand still
more. In 1868 Bristol Brass pur- chased the Forestville burner shop from George W. Brown and Com- pany. Nine years before this, the world's first oil well was drilled at Titusville, Pennsylvania, and people began burning kerosene with wicks instead of sperm oil and candles. The demand for lamps became na- tionwide, and those who got in on the ground floor made quick for- tunes.
Brown, who had been making mechanical toys, turned entirely to brass 'burners.' This profitable, fast-growing business provided an- other important outlet for Bristol Brass. Welch installed new equip- ment and launched a super selling campaign to sell the Bristol Brass 'Security Burner.'
In 1868 he further widened his clock empire by going into partner- ship with S. C. Spring and Company at the southwest corner of Riverside and East Street, the former Birge, Peck and Company, which made an excellent product. The new Welch, Spring and Company, after the mer- ger, was transferred, with the equip- ment, to the Manross plant in For- estville.
Welch symbolized the whole epic of American free enterprise. He had come to Bristol when the place was still a village, its small factories close to the handicraft era. He had worked at a crude bellows and forge. He had seen the various
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small clock factories come and go, shift and change and gradually shape themselves to big industries. He had salvaged bankrupt concerns to weld them together into more efficient large-scale producing en- terprises and had helped found many vital new industries. Thanks
in good part to him and to many other busy men, in spite of war and postwar deflation, Bristol was ready for the great technical and indus- trial expansion that came with the ending of the long, bitter conflict and the return of men to the ways of peace.
155
FIRE
LIFE
OFFICE
NOISITTIMH
SHOES HORS-LOGG SHOOT'T
BANK
NOTT-SEYMOUR BLOCK AT MAIN AND PROSPECT (Vault, Bristol Public Library)
»14 let there be light
IT rained all night Sunday, and it was still raining Monday morn- ing. Tomorrow would be the Fourth of July, 1876, one hundred years after the signing of the Decla- ration of Independence, and Arthur S. Brackett, who was only six, pressed his nose disconsolately against the window pane of the house at 66 Divinity Street and won- dered if the downpour would keep up and spoil everything.
Most of the folk on the street were descendants of Zebulon Peck, who had built here in 1776 at the time of the Revolution and had put up houses for many of his children.
The Brackett place was next door to Irenus Atkins, the street's oldest resident, who still ran his clock fac- tory, which stood at the western end of the street.
Further up the thoroughfare was the Hitchcock paper box concern. Reverend Benajah Hitchcock had started out making matches on Staf- ford Avenue in 1865, then had to make boxes for them. This proved to be the more profitable, and since
1872 he had been turning them out in his backyard on Divinity Street with the help of his nephew, Her- bert J. Mills.
There, near the river at the bridge that Candace Roberts had walked across on the way to the Carrington Tavern on Chippins Hill, also stood the Baptist Church. Beside it, along the south bank, was a row of horse sheds for people driving in to attend services. Only a path ran along the grassy bank, so carriages had to de- tour through Pleasant Street.
Arthur's father, Frank A. Brack- ett, was to be principal of the South side school, the Third School Dis- trict, and had rented the Divinity Street house for $12 a month. A big cherry tree stood in front, and behind, stretching through to Park Street, were several apple trees, a garden, chicken house and wood- shed.
The well under a lean-to beside the kitchen door was sweet cool water, with trout in it to keep it pure. The pails of milk were hung there. Now and then a rat fell in,
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THE MAKING OF BRISTOL
which meant hard work cleaning the well out, bucket by bucket.
Typhoid - 'Bristol fever' - the town's number-one killer, often came from such 'pure' wells. Every year a large share of the village's 5,000 people were stricken. Al- though conditions were better than in Candace Roberts's day, disease was still a dark specter in every fam- ily, rich or poor. Milk, which cost six cents a quart, was poured out of a pail at the door, no one knowing it might carry germs or come from tubercular cows. Young children often suffered so much from rickets for lack of proper vitamins, they had to be carried on pillows because of the pain in their bodies. Scurvy was common. In the 'eighties, Sig- ourney's store on Main Street brought in the first grapefruit, but most people thought them too bitter.
Neighbors were always helpful during illnesses, sending in food or watching at the bedside, for there were no trained nurses. Mrs. Ed- ward E. Newell and Mrs. Miles Lewis Peck, when girls of eighteen, often sat up with patients all night. Frequently they had to milk, do chores and cook. Wood or coal had to be brought in; oil lamps filled with kerosene, the wicks trimmed, and the glass chimneys cleaned of soot.
While one watcher was caring for the sick wife, the husband broke his leg, so she had to look after him
also, milk the cow, feed the chickens and cook. When both were well, she said timidly her services were worth $1.50. The man retorted in- dignantly that $1.25 was plenty.
There were only a few private water mains. On Chippins Hill, bored and fitted chestnut wood pipe, put in more than fifty years before, brought spring water to three houses and the tanner's. The early Ives clock plant and later manufac- tories had piped in water, and a number of short lines served Fed- eral Hill homes. Springs were tapped for the Ingraham plant and part of North Main Street. At Ar- thur's school, each room had only a bucket of water and tin dipper.
This Fourth of July, the weather cleared up fine. At midnight the bells began ringing loudly all over town. Arthur could hear the Bap- tist bell at West and Divinity Streets, and the Dunbar curfew bell, that rang ninety-nine times every evening at nine. It had been bought from the copper company after it went bankrupt in the 1857 depres- sion.
People began exploding powder on anvils and stones, and a roving band of 'Calliothumpers' added to the hubbub. A cry of 'Fire' brought people out in hasty attire. The hand-pump engine and hose cart came galloping out of the School Street engine house. In a few min-
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LET THERE BE LIGHT
utes the Uncas Engine and Hose company cart from North Main and the Zealot Hook and Ladder com- pany from Meadow Street showed up. The Uncas Hose company had been set up in 1870, with a second- hand fire engine bought from Nor- wich, and the Hook and Ladder company two years later.
The blaze proved to be only a huge bonfire alongside S. E. Root's three-story factory at 75 Main Street. The little boy, Arthur Brack- ett, looking at their fire, did not know that later on he would marry Root's granddaughter.
Root employed twenty-five per- sons, making clock and toy move- ments, clock dials, curtain fixtures and machinery. He had started in 1851 in a small shop where the burned Jerome clock plant had stood. When the Holmes and Tut- tle spoon factory was put up there, he took space in one of the Dunbar spring shops until he erected this big Main Street building. Several other concerns rented space there.
In 1859 he patented a heavy pa- per electrotype dial, triple-lac- quered on a zinc face and rimmed with brass. The dials were printed at the Bristol Press, the town's first permanent newspaper which, since 1872, had been using the upper floor of the factory.
Reverend Charles H. Riggs, a de- vout man who sometimes preached at the Congregationalist Church,
borrowed forty dollars each from N. L. Birge, Elias Ingraham, J. H. Sessions and Josiah T. Peck, and be- gan putting out this paper as a weekly March 9, 1871 on an old Washington hand press on the sec- ond floor of a frame building ad- joining the Seymour block near the railroad station. Bristol then had a population of 3,790 and felt a real need for a paper.
The first editorial said that if a newspaper writer was faithful to his trust, 'honest, fearless and inde- pendent' he was bound to make powerful enemies but the Bristol Press did not intend to remain 'tongue-tied on matters of vital im- portance.' The first issue contained odds and ends about the current Franco-Prussian War. Under 'Facts or Fancy,' it reported that the coun- try had 61,000 clergymen of all de- nominations, paid an average of $700 a year. It gave an account of Elisha Brewster's eightieth birthday celebration. In answer to one per- ennial problem, it provided infor- mation on how to reduce. The chil- dren's column had an anti-tobacco poem. Most tradesmen and the Bristol Savings Bank had ads.
The paper tied the community together in a new vital way as a clearing house for ideas of what was good for Bristol, and it stimulated people to write the story of Bristol's past. It would have been a calam- ity for it to have gone up in flames.
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THE MAKING OF BRISTOL
A rival paper, the Pequabuck Val- ley Gazette, was started January 1, 1876, by Milo Norton in the old Gridley Building over the Merri- man drugstore at the corner of Main and North Main-'An A-1 clipper- built newspaper' it called itself. The Bristol Weekly Times, published by a Waterbury paper, also circulated.
The excitement over the fire added to everybody's all night wakefulness and patriotism. It was going to be a glorious Fourth, no rain after all.
Arthur bounded out of bed at daybreak, awakened by a salute of thirty-seven guns fired for every state in the Union. There had been argument about this for Colorado was expected to be admitted before the month was out. The din grew louder every minute.
At ten o'clock his father took him to see the parade. They greeted friends on the steps of Bristol House at 75 South Street. A block down was Warner's clock parts factory making clock verges, pendulum rods, hair-springs and wire bells. At the foot of Main Street stood Dun- bar's big yellow mansion and the Wallace Barnes home. On Main Street they went past the office of Dr. George S. Hull, one of the city's popular physicians, and the Barnes spring plant, decorated with flags, where people watched from the windows.
It was a big remodeled barn that Wallace had moved to the gutted foundations after his bad fire. In spite of his heavy loss, he had equipped it with the first steam boiler used in Bristol. To tide over his disaster, for several years he made many things besides springs - apple corers and slicers and stove ornaments. He even sold veloci- pedes. He got in a few dollars by renting out Crinoline Hall for magi- cians and 'Wizard Performances,' for Spiritual Meetings, and mu- sical programs. On March 31, 1868, he sold it to the selectmen for a Town Hall.
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