USA > Connecticut > Hartford County > Bristol > Our Yankee heritage: the making of Bristol > Part 14
Note: The text from this book was generated using artificial intelligence so there may be some errors. The full pages can be found on Archive.org (link on the Part 1 page).
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12 | Part 13 | Part 14 | Part 15 | Part 16 | Part 17 | Part 18 | Part 19 | Part 20 | Part 21 | Part 22 | Part 23 | Part 24 | Part 25 | Part 26 | Part 27 | Part 28
There Grand Marshal Gilbert Penfield, who owned the music and sewing-machine store, was getting the first sections of the parade in marching order. Arthur and his fa- ther found a good place near Water Street, not far from the big Mitchell store.
All the Main Street establish- ments were decorated: Sidney Ol- cott's stove and tin shop; Skinner and McMullen's oyster and fish places; Tom Brown's horseshoeing shop and meeting hall; James Avery's carriage repair shop. Along- side, Mrs. Sarah Avery ran the Tem- perance Lunch Room.
The band played a Sousa march. Old Major Asa Bartholomew, the horse trader, cattle breeder and butcher, hove into view, wearing his ancient regimentals, followed by
160
LET THERE BE LIGHT
'pioneers' carrying axes, picks and other tools, then boys carrying flags.
There were big Irish and German delegations, with due foresight separated by the Number 1 Fire Company. In spite of its midnight dash, its pump was well polished and garlanded with flowers. The volunteer firemen received twenty cents an hour for fires and parades and were clad in gaudy blue and scarlet uniforms, with braid and plumes, each company trying to out- rival the other.
The Irish contingent carried the green flag of Erin. The Germans carried the old red, white and black flag, the new imperial flag with the iron cross or swastika, and the flag of Bavaria. A large wagon, draped with red, white and blue bunting, was filled with tow-headed German children. To one leading German citizen Bristol owed the building of its fine Opera House on Laurel Street.
There were many showy carriages and horsemen in gay or grotesque costumes. Women, behind on pil- lions, wore old-fashioned sunbon- nets. One wagon contained thirteen girls in colonial dress; another, twenty-four girls representing each of the later states.
The parade paused near the rail- road station. On one side were grocery stores and men's furnishing shops. The large Merrick and Mer-
riman grocery and merchandise stores were in the Nott-Seymour buildings, which had burned down three years ago but had been re- built in more handsome modern style. Adrian J. Muzzy and his part- ner, Thomas F. Barbour, had a men's clothing store there. The post office rented a room in the same building.
Just beyond were the Y.M.C.A., Gwillim's jewelry store and the Bris- tol Weekly Times. Up the hill were the National Bank and Savings Bank.
The Bristol Savings Bank, headed by Henry A. Seymour, had been founded in 1870 in an upstairs room of the Nott building near the rail- road. The first deposit of $80 was by Lucy Beckwith. Before the year was out, it had 556 depositors and nearly $100,000 in deposits.
The second year, Miles Lewis Peck became treasurer and also - as he put it - janitor, teller, cashier, bookkeeper, investor and title searcher for proposed mortgages. He carried all the bank money around in his pocket till it could be sent to Hartford.
After the fire, the bank hired a desk in Merriman's drugstore, but now it had its own building. The Town Records that had been housed in a mouldy vault behind a shack on the Gridley property were now preserved properly on the upper floor. The National Bank was using
161
THE MAKING OF BRISTOL
the same building till it could build its own.
The Bristol National Bank had been organized only last year - 1875 - by Miles Lewis Peck and John H. Sessions, with an initial capital of $100,000. Deposits the first day totalled about $15,000. The first week the bank made loans of $786. Charles Seth Treadway, who had learned the banking business in Waterbury and Kansas, was invited in as cashier.
The parade moved on up North Main, past several livery stables, three saloons run by Bunyan, Pil- grim and Paradise, billiard parlors, the Wilcox and Judd coal and lum- ber yard, John A. Burke's cigar manufactory, Daniel B. Goldsmith's sign-painting place, and William A. Terry's photography studio at Lau- rel Street.
On Meadow Street was the Dar- row Manufacturing Company, headed by J. T. Peck. Captain Darrow, on returning wounded from the Civil War, had taken up the making of rawhide doll heads. The concern also made leather doll bodies and other leather goods, sash cord and belting. Their patented horseshoe pads were said to be the best.
The parade boomed on past the Sessions trunk-hardware plant. The Sessions from Burlington were ac- tive Methodists. Their English
forebears had been prominent Brit- ish officials and manufacturers. Cal- vin Sessions came to Burlington early and started a cloth factory. His son, John Humphrey Sessions, engaged for more than ten years in wood turning in Polkville, in 1868 started a shop at North Main Street. Before long he bought more land and erected other buildings.
Two brothers started making iron trunk hinges and clamps in South- ington. They loaded their equip- ment on to oxcarts and moved to Bristol. One brother went off to Mount Carmel and on to Ohio, and when the other died, John Hum- phrey merged the business with his wood-turning enterprise. Three years later -1873 - he took his son in as partner, forming J. H. Sessions and Son.
In another plant at 124 North Main, John Humphrey set up the National Water Wheel Company to manufacture turbine wheels in- vented by J. T. Case. These were a uniform-working double-gate de- vice adjustable to any amount of water and were made from five inches in diameter up to five feet, from thirteen pounds to six tons.
The parade moved on slowly past Watson Giddings's carriage shop, and George Jones's clock and clock-wire factory, an old busi- ness started thirty years earlier by Wilfred H. Nettleton. Jones also made hardware, mechanisms for
162
OFFICE
INGRAHAM CLOCK WORKS IN EARLY DAYS (Vault, Bristol Public Library)
THE MAKING OF BRISTOL
striking clocks, water and gas meters and burglar alarms. Part of the plant was being used by G. H. Blakeslee to make hair curlers and arm bands. On Federal Street, in the factory first started by Chauncey Ives, Noah Pomeroy, who had bought it in 1849, was still making clocks.
The Ingraham company was us- ing wooden buildings on North Main on either side of North Street. With his son as partner, Elias had done marvels. They were putting the best designs on the market, and the inner works were better than the Welch articles.
For the Fourth of July speech- making and music, 1,500 people, a third of the population, were crowded before a decorated plat- form where the flags of the parade were now draped. Pretty Cora Pardee, wrapped in the Stars and Stripes, impersonated the Goddess of Liberty.
Reverend H. T. Staats offered prayer, and M. N. Woodford, a fine Baptist choir singer, aided by the band, led the crowd in singing 'America.'
Reverend Horne of Forestville told how one hundred years ago John Quincy Adams, at the signing of the Declaration, had prophesied that future generations would cele- brate the event by illuminations, fir- ing of cannon and much eloquence.
It was certainly true. Today, he pointed out, millions all over the country were assembled; every- where, cannons were booming; un- doubtedly there was much elo- quence.
"Is there any reason for all this joy?" demanded the Reverend. "One hundred years ago, our nation consisted of but thirteen states. A century ago our population was but 3,000,000; now it is 40,000,000. A century ago, there was but one newspaper for every ten thousand people, now the great dailies are printed at the rate of 50,000 a year. . .
"Fifty years ago President Jack- son had to send his despatches by post horses; now the President can send a despatch and receive an an- swer from San Francisco in ten minutes and from the Court of St. James in half an hour. Fifty years ago merchants' orders reached China in six months and the goods were received in about a year. To- day orders can be sent in one hour to the ends of the earth.
"A century ago there were but 150 Methodist churches, now they are being built at the rate of three or four a day. . . . A century ago there was no Bible Society, now every year 1,000,000 copies of the Scriptures fall like leaves from the tree of life."
The band played. Miss Pardee, the Goddess of Liberty, read the
164
LET THERE BE LIGHT
Declaration of Independence - as it was once read near here a century earlier at a grimmer moment of struggle.
With due intervals of band play- ing, singing of patriotic songs and old favorites such as 'Auld Lang Syne,' and some poetry recitations, four other ministers delivered ad- dresses of varying length. All echoed the same note of progress and optimism.
Arthur was half-starving by three o'clock when he went home for lunch. His father went off to a banquet of sixty plates at the Bristol House on South Street, 'a feast of good things ... worthy of the high- est praise,' said Editor Riggs of the Bristol Press, 'provided by Mr. Smith, the landlord, and his worthy lady.
That night Arthur's parents took him up Federal Hill to see the fire- works. J. H. Sessions Junior, in charge of the display, started as soon as it got dark because of threatening rain.
South of the new two-story, one- teacher schoolhouse and across the way from the Congregational Church and its horse sheds that had replaced the old Sabbath houses, stood wooden St. Joseph's Church, built here in 1855. The Episco- palians, formerly on Maple Street, had recently built a new church at Main and Prospect. and their old
edifice had been bought by the Methodists and moved to Forest- ville.
Tonight, since a wind was whip- ping up and a few scattered drops of rain fell, the finest pieces were shot off first, a flag, a shield, and a great flaming banner '1776 July 4 1876.' Nothing later matched these prize pieces, though there were plenty of rockets, Roman candles, pinwheels and exploding mines that kept showering the sky with color and noise till ten o'clock. The illu- minated balloon was ripped apart by the wind, so was Professor Don- aldson's great Transatlantic Graphic Air Ship, but in spite of such mis- haps, Editor Riggs reported it a fine success that reflected great credit upon our village and all concerned.' In spite of occasional scurries of rain, the band kept on playing val- iantly to the very end.
Going home in the dark was not easy. There was no street-lighting except where a few prosperous civic-minded folk had set out lamp posts in front of their homes, and one was apt to bump into the hitch- ing posts before every house or fall into a rain puddle. Except for 300 feet of tar on Main Street in front of Wallace Barnes Company, there were only dirt sidewalks.
Ever since the Bristol Press had started, people had been writing in about mishaps in the dark for lack of street lights. 'Ann Tiquity' wrote
165
THE MAKING OF BRISTOL
that she was an old lady who had fallen into a mud hole and had hurt her ankle so badly she 'couldn't walk for the hull o' two weeks.'
As Arthur grew older, he hiked to Compounce Lake or Cedar Swamp. Usually he climbed over the fence and cut across fields, where hunters shot snipe, a stretch unbroken as far as South Street. Sometimes he and his friends went alongside the di- lapidated Root Island shop at the Pequabuck where Joel S. Root was making piano hardware, brass butts and other brass goods, and S. G. Monce was making adjustable sten- cil plates and steel disk glass cutters he had invented.
Just north on Laurel Street was the Bristol Foundry Company, started by Andrew Terry and a part- ner in 1875.
On Union Street they passed the factory of H. J. Clayton, an English- man, who, the previous year, had started making sewing-machine screw drivers and table cutlery, and N. P. Thompson and Son who made carriage and patented wagon wheels. Thompson was working on a 'steam carriage' which would use a rotary engine invented by Ru- fus W. Porter.
To go to Compounce, the boys took either the Mountain Road or went up East Road to Emerson Wil- cox's orchard, then over a trail for a quarter of a mile. Among the
attractions at the Lake were the summer theatre, the Sunday band concert and rowboats.
Or they went up Wolcott Street to Cedar Swamp, which had been dammed to serve small wood and metal shops and now was a beauti- ful lake, used for boating, swimming and fishing. One day Arthur came upon William A. Terry looking for diatoms.
Terry, the florist and photogra- pher, was an unusual genius. He made many of his own chemicals and had invented several calendar clocks. The first was manufactured by Atkins Clock Company. His calendar clock 'self adjusting for Icap years - the most perfect ever made' was being manufactured by the Ansonia Clock Company.
But his great passion was dia- toms. Among the great Bristol fos- sil beds of these tiny one-celled or- ganisms and in living survivals in ponds and lakes, he had discovered new species, several of which scien- tists named after him.
Often Arthur dropped in at the Y.M.C.A. Library in the Seymour Building, later to become the Bristol Public Library. This collection had been started by the 'New Carpet So- ciety' of the Congregational Church about 1845. By 1868 'The Old Maids Library' had grown to 445 volumes and was turned over with all collected funds to the Y.M.C.A. to be maintained as a public insti-
166
LET THERE BE LIGHT
tution. Though it had been burned out on various occasions, it now had nearly 2,000 volumes.
Arthur went with his father to see the big factories on Water Street, later to be called Riverside Ave- nue. Welch's Bristol Manufactur- ing Company, making knit under- wear was being revamped. There were several clock factories and the Bristol Saw Company, which had taken over the plant where Harold J. Potter, owner of thoroughbred horses, used to make melodeons, and a man named Shady made rock- ing horses. The saw company had been owned since 1862 by H. Porter.
The first Bristol saws had been made by Irenus Atkins. Now, fifty years later, thousands of saws were being made by a new process, from imported English steel. Smaller saws were made from sheet steel and circular saws from 'saw blanks' - rough, unpolished and untem- pered steel disks. Huge presses, the largest ones in Bristol, cut out the 'arbor hole' in the center and the teeth, all perfectly gauged. The saws, flattened under heavy pres- sure, were tempered in four fur- naces and dipped in an oil bath, the composition of which was a jeal- ously guarded secret. In the grind- ing room they were beveled thin on stones by means of moving car- riages, then polished and etched with chemicals.
Big ice saws helped cut the frozen ponds for the various icehouses around Bristol. Even bigger lumber saws helped cut the trees on Fall Mountain and beyond Chippins Hill for wood for homes and fac- tories. Thin types were in demand by cigar-box companies. All varie- ties were being made: 'circular, shingle, top, gang, muling, concave, ivory, hand, band, panel, butcher, scrolls, crosscut, hack, ice, book- binding.' Some saws weighed 175 pounds and were sixty-four inches in diameter. The wafer-thin saws were so light two dozen could be mailed for two cents. Circular saws ranged in price from forty cents to $325. Slitters, rotary shears and boxmaker rules were also being manufactured.
On another day, Arthur and his father visited the two Forestville schools on Academy Street and Staf- ford Avenue, and went to see the enormous Welch clock plants and the prosperous Bristol Brass lamp factory. They also looked in at La- porte Hubbell and Son on Frederick Street, making lever and pendulum and marine clocks and bank-lock chronometers. There was also an auger bit factory nearby, run by Charles F. Andrews.
In 1883 Arthur entered Bristol's first high school class, a handful of students using two rooms on the second floor of the District Three
167
HOTEL COMMERCIAL AND OPERA HOUSE (Vault, Bristol Public Library)
=
LET THERE BE LIGHT
grammar school where his father was principal.
By then Arthur was going to church socials where they played Copenhagen, Spin the Platter, Post Office, and Clap-In Clap-Out. He saw Gilbert and Sullivan's 'Pinafore' at Town Hall and went to the Opera House on Laurel Street and to dine at
nearby Commercial House, which had just built a big new addition. He saw a minstrel show at the Bristol Press auditorium.
The paper now had its own build- ing. In 1877 Reverend Riggs took in as partner E. S. Pratt, a retiring grammar school principal. They leased ground on Main Street near Riverside and put in the first oil- burning unit in Bristol. The second floor was made into a hall for a hun- dred people, the largest in town. The partnership broke up two years later, and Riggs erected another building adjoining the first.
He bought out the Pequabuck Valley Gazette and the Times, but for ten years was faced by another rival, the Bristol Herald, with offices in the Gridley block. Edited most of the time by Lucius B. Norton, it was an aggressive paper that at- tacked the 'political ring' and pro- voked libel suits. Several efforts were made to suppress it. One edi- tor was given a 'sound strapping' by a leading citizen.
By the time Arthur started in high school, he was talking to his friends
over the telephone. The service had been started by the Connecticut Telephone Company in 1881 with forty-six subscribers. The exchange, in the post office building at 144 Main Street, was operated by one- armed Civil War veteran, Postmas- ter S. M. Norton.
Presently Bristol was provided with a water system. For more than ten years, the town had been surveying possibilities, and Charles S. Treadway kept trying to arouse the citizens to act. When his urg- ings brought only indifference, he and J. H. Sessions organized the Bristol Water Company and began laying down cast-iron pipes. The twelve-inch central main, three miles long, tapped a huge reservoir northwest at the Plymouth line. Later, other reservoirs were built in Harwinton and in Plymouth.
Not till then was Bristol's growth assured. With ample water, indus- tries could expand. Over the years, with the loss of surrounding woods, the volume of Pequabuck water had decreased to a fourth of what it had been in the days when Ebenezer had put up his house and Plum had built the first mills. Various small brooks on which factories depended had almost dried up. Now new siz- able industries could risk coming to Bristol.
Nor till there was a pure water system could Bristol enjoy health and stop typhoid scourges. The ar-
169
THE MAKING OF BRISTOL
rival of piped-in water corre- sponded with the revolutionary in- vention known as 'Inside Plumbing,' and Bristol Brass began making many miles of brass pipes and fit- tings.
Treadway took such a lively in- terest in the company that one sub- zero night when pressure dropped to nothing, he and the superintend- ent worked all night hacking an- chor ice from the outlet screen. The civic-minded banker was no longer young, and that bitter exposure probably hastened his death.
June 17, 1885 was a most appro- priate day and year to get water. Bristol was exactly a hundred years old as a town, and at six a.m. the Federal Hill cannon boomed salutes, the church bells rang. Ten thou- sand people thronged to hear Chaun- cey Jerome, the clockmaker, re- turned to Bristol after forty years' absence, deliver the key address on the Hill. The size of the crowd showed how rapidly Bristol had grown, and Jerome, who remem- bered only a few buildings on the South side where he used to fish for trout in the little stream that crossed Laurel Street, was 'astonished' at the progress, prosperity and growth.
In 1886 Bristol got another im- portant industry. Old Everett Hor- ton, who had a small machine shop on Oak Street, walked into the Bristol National Bank and pulled
a steel rod out of his trouser leg. "Why do you carry that thing down your leg?" Charles S. Tread- way asked.
The rod was jointed. Horton pulled it out full length. "Just think how you could go fishing on Sun- days without anybody knowing it."
"Whoever heard of a steel fishing rod?" said Treadway.
"They will," retorted Horton, "and you're going to manufacture them."
Treadway bought the patent and organized the Horton Manufactur- ing Company. 'The Bristol Fishing Rod' soon became famous. The Oak Street shop proved too small, and a small frame building was put up on North Main Street, then a modern well-equipped factory giv- ing employment to a hundred workers.
Other industries expanded. At Ingraham's, two 100 horsepower boilers were installed to run the ma- chinery of five factories and heat the residence of Edward Ingraham, now managing the firm. A 200,000 foot capacity kiln-drying shed for clockcase wood was built. A 250 horsepower high-speed Corliss en- gine with a ten ton fly-wheel pro- vided electric light, maintained 700 automatic sprinklers, and turned a 606 foot shaft with belting to move machinery. Suction drew off all dust and shavings from every saw and planer. On the four floors of the main factory, five hundred em-
170
LET THERE BE LIGHT
ployees made nearly 250,000 clocks a year, valued at from $8.50 to $18.50.
Arthur was graduated from high school that year with seven others. By then 'advanced courses' were be- ing given in three of the district schools, and for the following year a high school was definitely organ- ized with seventy-three pupils and Frank A. Brackett as principal, as- sisted by one woman teacher.
Electric lights also came to Bris- tol. In 1886 the Bristol Electric Light Company put a dynamo in Eaton's mill, later built a plant on 'Gridley Hill.'
The first street arc lights were maintained by private subscription at a cost of $100 a year, and Arthur's first job, before he went off to Yale, was to climb poles and replace burned-out carbon rods. Not until July 1, 1892, did the city contract for forty lights at $90 per year, twenty-nine in Bristol, ten in Forest- ville, one at Pierce's bridge. In 1896 fifty-five were maintained by the city, ten others were maintained privately. Ingraham's, Sessions Foundry, the Spoon Shop and New Departure had their own lighting systems.
At first, for economy, street lights were turned off on moonlit nights, on other nights at eleven, the hour when all good souls should be home in bed.
The lighting of the streets stopped a flood of complaining letters to the Bristol Press and perhaps saved many an 'Ann Tiquity' from falling into some puddle or off unrailed bridges. But the light company did more than bring light.
It provided power that replaced the fickle turbines on the dwindling little brooks. In due time electric- ity multiplied the productive capac- ity of each Bristol workman 168 times. Factories could now grow to any size, and the age of mass pro- duction was at hand to bring com- forts, to put running water into every home, to help wipe out the old epidemics and provide better food and shelter, new pleasures and more leisure.
One of the men who did much to help bring about this new health and enjoyment for Bristol was Dr. Arthur S. Brackett, once a boy who lived on Divinity Street and climbed Federal Hill to watch fireworks one hundred years after freedom was won.
171
267
EW HARARE
RAILROAD SQUARE, EARLY VIEW (Vault, Bristol Public Library)
ยป15
THE horseless buggy
ARTHUR NEWTON MANROSS was only twelve, not old enough to enter the bicycle races at the Grange Fair that October 1, 1890. There were amusing incidents. In the 'one-mile safety race,' William Par- dee would have come out first and won a glass clock as prize, but an ox team ambled on to the track, and two other riders swept past him tri- umphantly, so he came in third and won only a pair of tennis shoes. In the 'one-mile handicap' two riders bumped into each other and took bad headers.
Thousands of people crowded the Hickory Park grounds to look at the industrial products. They milled around the sideshow concession, having their weight guessed, tossing rings over pegs and stuffing on pea- nuts and popcorn. Prizes were given out for poultry, Hereford . bulls, calves and other entries.
A. F. Williams displayed his 'Monitor' chicken incubators and brooders. Special types were made for new-born babies in hospitals. H. J. Mills showed his paper boxes.
He had taken over from his uncle Benajah Hitchcock and had put up a new plant on Church Street.
The industrial parade that began at two o'clock, reported the Bristol Press, "went ahead by long odds, of anything ever gotten up for such an occasion in Bristol." Nearly every businessman, and many from Plym- outh, Plainville, Wolcott and Mad River, had piled their wares in more or less artistic fashion on to about eighty decorated wagons.
Carleton B. Ives's meat market at 113 Main Street entered four wag- ons with fowls, animals, meat, beeves on hooks and aproned butch- ers. The A. J. Muzzy wagon bore a house cleverly constructed, with rugs and drapes.
What most took Arthur's fancy was the Compounce resort display which showed old 'Chief Com- pounce' sitting in an iron kettle with two paddles just as he was supposed to have crossed the lake long ago.
Need help finding more records? Try our genealogical records directory which has more than 1 million sources to help you more easily locate the available records.