USA > Connecticut > Tercentenary pamphlet series, v. 3 The Beginnings of Roman Catholicism in Connecticut > Part 8
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The most important industrial product sent abroad had still in it the tang of the soil; it was alcoholic liquor distilled from domestic materials. Gin greatly exceeded in importance any other manufacture exported. The Ga- zetteer of 1819 asserted: "There is probably no town in the United States where there is as great a quantity of spirit made from grain as in East Windsor." The distil-
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leries of that town, including Warehouse Point, paid taxes amounting to over $20,000 to the collector of inter- nal revenue in 1816. In old Windsor, "almost every respectable farmer has a small distillery upon his own premises," where he made cider brandy.
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OTHER products of manufacture are not described here because they were still unimportant in Connecticut's export trade. The Gazetteer referred to them: tinware, clocks, hats, shoes, buttons, carriages, and so forth. But it left them in the background, with no suggestion of the part which they and products like them were to play in the future of the state. To understand the Connecticut of the time, particularly the reasons why so many inhab- itants were leaving it, one must forget these infant indus- tries and attend to the conditions under which most of the people lived.
When the Gazetteer was published, only three towns in the state had a population over five thousand; New Haven had over eight thousand, but Hartford and Mid- dletown did not reach seven thousand. The mass of the people, an overwhelming majority, lived in little villages of a few hundred families. Even in 1840 the density of population, sixty-four to a square mile, was nearly the same as that shown in the 1930 census by North Carolina and Kentucky. If everybody in the state had lived by agriculture there was land enough to give each family a fifty-acre farm. The "cities" long retained rural charac- teristics. The first President Dwight of Yale denied that most inhabitants of New Haven had farms, but he boasted that "The city of New Haven contains probably as many good kitchen gardens as any town in the state." It looked like a country town to Jerome when he saw it in 1812,
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with loads of wood and chips lying in front of the houses, and with acres of land devoted to cornfields.
To understand the conditions which preceded the rise of modern manufactures, it is important to realize, not only that the large towns were rural but also that the little towns and villages were industrial to an extent un- known in a later period. The trade in the products of manufacture was still so slight that self-sufficiency was the rule, as it had been in the colonial period. Each family made what it could for itself, and satisfied most of its remaining requirements by the labor of artisans living in the immediate vicinity. The colonial practice of making cloth in the household still persisted in 1819. "With the exception of the cities," it was said "almost every family manufactures the substantial woolen fabrics for their own consumption." Carding machines and cloth-dressing es- tablishments were scattered all over the state, and were a regular part of the equipment of each town. Some towns in Windham county had "a loom in almost every house," where the domestic manufacture supplied "almost ex- clusively the substantial fabrics of clothing for the inhab- itants." This family manufacture was, however, rapidly fading away, undermined by the cheaper product of the factories. A report of 1832 from this same county of Windham said that the household manufacture of textiles had "mostly ceased in this section of the country, for the farmers can exchange their produce at a cheaper rate than they can manufacture"; and a state official made much the same report for Connecticut as a whole.
If the family bought its cloth from some outside source it still depended on artisans in the vicinity to make most of those things which could not be made at home. Every town as a matter of course had a sawmill to supply its building materials, and a gristmill to turn the local grain
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crop into meal or flour. Almost every town had a tannery, and most towns had men and women to make their foot- wear. Every town had its blacksmiths and most had wheelwrights able to meet the local demand for wagons and carriages. The people of an individual town might not have the special artisans to meet less general needs, but would certainly not have to go far to find them: cabinetmakers for their furniture, harnessmakers, makers of the various agricultural implements, tinners for their kitchenware, hatters for their headgear. The statistics of 1845 show such a general distribution of these artisans through the towns of the state that it may be safely as- sumed that the normal market for their products was very limited-certainly not county-wide.
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IF the list above includes most of the products needed for a simple life it obviously does not include them all. The housewife would want not only cloth but also needle and thread, a thimble and buttons, some glass and earth- enware; the man would want some tools, some hardware, perhaps some books; the family would want its tea or coffee, its sweetening, its pepper and salt and spice.
Payment for these wares, in large part imported into the state from abroad, involved in turn finding something in the state which could be produced on terms that en- abled it to be sold outside. This was the problem set to residents of Connecticut, and it was a hard one. The ex- port of the products of agriculture, enumerated in the : Gazetteer of 1819, was no real solution. Any resident of the state knows that its glacial soil, outside the narrow area of the river valleys, yields grain crops with reluc- tance. With the crude fertilizers and simple implements of a century ago, hard labor was but sparingly repaid.
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Animal husbandry fared better on the grass of the mead- ows and pastures. Yet anyone who faced the problem of making a living from the Connecticut soil, and of winning from it a surplus which would buy him the comforts of life, might well be daunted by the outlook and choose rather to emigrate.
Faced by this problem the people of Connecticut were forced into manufacturing if they would stay at home and live. Grinding necessity was the mother of Connecti- cut manufactures. "Waterbury," in the words of her historian, "owes her prosperity to the poorness of her soil"; a wealthy city grew up on the site of "Pusleytown" because there, even in Connecticut, the soil deserved a term of contempt. The natural advantages for manu- facture were very scanty. The water power, so often cited to explain the rise of industries, was no better than that of many other states-was in fact not so good as that of other states in the East. There was good iron ore and a little copper, but again, no monopoly of either. It is characteristic that the first manufacture to establish a market outside the state-that of tinware-worked on imported materials and used no power; the same was true of another early export industry, the Danbury hat trade. Physical resources were scanty; capital was scanty; the one essential element present in abundance was labor.
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THIS last term, labor, is ambiguous and may be mislead- ing. It is used here to embrace the whole human element, brains as well as hands. The importance of the distinction will appear in this survey of Connecticut's industrial de- velopment. In the individual, brain and hands work to- gether. In a group their functions can be separated. Brains take control, direct the hands of others, and enable
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the group as a whole to accomplish immeasurably more than could the individuals working separately, each de- pendent on his own vision for direction.
Labor in the manual sense was cheap in the first part of the nineteenth century. Young men would go to work about 1813 for Simeon North, the pistol maker of Berlin, for $6 or $8 a month as apprentices, and would get $12 a month as skilled hands. Board could be had then and much later at $1.50 to $2 a week, but there were bad years when working people felt the pinch of real priva- tion. Chauncey Jerome, the clockmaker, got work as a joiner in Farmington in 1815 at $20 a month, and mar- ried, but if one can believe his recollections, he had to pay in that year $13 a barrel for flour, 75c. a gallon for molasses, 34c. a pound for brown sugar, $I a yard for cotton cloth no better than what he could buy in his later life for Ioc. Comprehensive statistics of 1832 show that Connecticut textile factories paid men $I a day, women 35c., children about 2Ic. Children were defined as those under twelve years of age; and the usual working time in Connecticut shops and factories was twelve hours a day. In special trades and in large towns such as New Haven, the rate of pay ran up to $1.25 a day and even more, but in less skilled work such as shoemaking, and in the country districts, the rate was under $1, and the monthly earnings might be $15 or $20. Philip Corbin, the founder of a great hardware industry in New Britain, went to work in a factory in 1844 at $14 a month, board- ing himself, instead of choosing farm work at $12 to $15 with board included. Even these modest wages were not paid promptly; till many years later New Britain factories paid their employees once a month, and reserved two weeks' pay. When Corbin introduced weekly payments in 1879 his employees celebrated by a procession with a band.
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Low as these wage scales seem at the present day they were no different from those in neighboring states, and in many cases were above the European standard. If the people of Connecticut were to be given a living at home they could not count on employment merely because they were willing to work so cheaply. They fared no better on the farm. The agent of a Pomfret cotton factory, whose policy was to "hire poor families from the farming business, of from four to six children," calculated that the farmer before had earned a yearly income of $180 to $200, while the whole family at work in the factory would receive $450 to $600-and, he said, could save money!
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HANDS there were in plenty in Connecticut, as the low wage scale sufficiently attests. What was needed was brains to direct the hands. The great problem for brains to solve was the problem of the market-how to sell the goods which the people here were ready to make if a purchaser could be found for them. Today there is an elaborate marketing system, based on the automobile truck, the railroad, the post, and telegraph service, and on the trained specialists who combine to put goods where they are wanted. Consequently, one can hardly conceive the difficulties which then faced a manufacturer in Connecticut who sought to build up those connections with distant purchasers which were essential if he were to establish an industry in the state. He had one advantage -- and this was about his only one-proximity to the city of New York which was growing rapidly in wealth and population, and which had established itself as the natural distributing center of industrial products. From New York water routes led to the interior and to the richest market of the time, the Southern states. The
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profits of cotton growing absorbed so far the energy of the South that it had little time to spend on other products; but cotton gave it plenty of money to buy them. The Southerners were in large measure right, when they asserted that Northern industries were built on a foundation of slave-grown cotton.
In the book, New England's prospect, 1933," one of the authors, C. E. Artman, criticized the manufacturers of the region for attending so much to the making of goods that they neglected the problem of sales. "New England character in the past expressed itself primarily in produc- tion. Yankee shrewdness was confined mainly to the; technique of manufacturing, while distribution and market promotion were left largely to shift for them -. selves. Out of this arose almost a scorn of trading. 'Let the goods speak for themselves' was the general attitude." Denying Emerson's remark that if a man makes some- thing very good, even a mousetrap, the world will wear a : path to his door, the author concluded: "The mousetrap must be taken to the people who have mice to catch." Whatever truth there may be in the criticism as applied to recent times it certainly did not hold true of the forma- - tive period of Connecticut manufactures.
VII
THE energy and persistence shown in getting goods to market were nothing less than amazing. An excellent! illustration was that classic of early Connecticut manu- factures, the tinware industry. An immigrant from Ire- land, by trade a tinner, had settled in Berlin about 1740, plied his trade, and taught it to others. By the close of the War of 1812, the industry had grown to considerable dimensions. At that time ten thousand boxes of tin plate
I New York, American Geographical Society, 1933.
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were said to have been made annually into finished wares in Berlin alone, and the manufacture had spread to other towns (Meriden, Bristol) where it was combined with other trades. The industry was notable in that it em- ployed more people in the marketing process than in the manufacture itself. The wares were made in small shops, were then loaded into wagons, and put in charge of peddlers who were sent out in search of purchasers. A contract between the Yale brothers of Meriden and a certain Francis in 1816, engaged Francis to provide horse and wagon, "to hawk, peddle and vend" their wares wherever he was sent, for fixed wages of $30 a month, plus $10 extra a month if it was cleared above costs, and in addition a half share of all profits. The interest of the agent was thus engaged in marketing the wares, but he was by no means sure of success. One salesman wrote to the Yales in 1814 that there would be a loss of $100 on the trip unless fortune changed: "R. Baldwin and I have traversed the country from Dan to Beersheba, besides going to Albany, and I have not sold either buttons or spoons to any amount. ... Tin goes extremely well." At the end of his route, perhaps Richmond, Charleston, or Savannah, the salesman would find one or more workers established and ready to replenish his stock with wares which they had made from material brought with them, and the salesman would take to the road again. "Every inhabited part of the United States is visited by these men," wrote the elder Timothy Dwight, "I have seen them on the peninsula of Cape Cod, and in the neighbour- hood of Lake Erie, distant from each other more than six hundred miles. They make their way to Detroit, four hundred miles farther; to Canada, to Kentucky, and, if I mistake not, to New-Orleans and St. Louis."
The trade in tinware was never very important,
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measured either by the employment it offered or the exports it provided. One English traveler mentioned a Berlin manufacturer who employed sixty hands, but of these most were probably on the road or working at distant stations. Making tinware was still a hand trade. Later it was mechanized in characteristic American fashion and the way prepared for the great corporations which now make tin containers. An English commission sent in 1854 to report on the application of machinery in America noted: "The class of tools commonly used by tinmen are almost obsolete in New England States. In a well-furnished tinman's shop there are about twelve different kinds of machines employed." The significance of the tinware trade in this early period lay in its methods of marketing rather than of manufacture. It did much to teach the people of Connecticut that they could look far afield for their market, and could reach purchasers of their industrial products despite all the difficulties which seemed to bar the way.
A more important industry was the manufacture of hats. The hatter's trade was widespread in the Northern colonies, and by 1800 every large town would have its hatter to supply the needs of the adjacent region. Even by 1800, however, there was a remarkable concentration of the trade in Danbury. That town, then of about three thousand inhabitants, was already producing over twenty thousand hats a year. Doubtless the industry got its start there by reason of adjacency to the city of New York, but it gained its growth largely by developing the Southern market. As early as 1816 two stores had been established in Charleston, South Carolina, to sell Dan- bury hats. The manufacturers were progressive in making as well as marketing. In 1835 they introduced the silk hat in place of the old beaver, and they began that process of
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mechanizing the manufacture which enabled them in the following period to hold their own against all competitors.
Another manufacture in which Connecticut appeared to have no peculiar advantage, but which it developed to an important extent, was that of carriages. The factory established in New Haven by James Brewster in 1809 set a high standard, not only in the treatment of labor but also in the quality of work. The spread of turnpike roads stimulated a demand for better vehicles in the North, but in this case again the South was the mainstay of the trade. Before the Civil War the carriage trade of New Haven alone occupied over sixty establishments, includ- ing one said to be the largest in the world, with an output of one finished carriage an hour. The factory operations had been systematized and machinery had been intro- duced in many of the processes. The product was mar- keted not only in the United States, but also in Caribbean countries, in South America, and even in the islands of the Pacific.
The clock industry was domiciled in Connecticut as much by the efficiency of the salesman as by the in- genuity of the maker. Jerome used to see, about 1800, clockmakers bound for New York state on horseback, with clocks to sell, one in each saddlebag and one strapped behind. Jerome obtained his start in the clock business by going to New Jersey to make cases for tall clocks which were too bulky to be transported, and later made a great advance by the invention of an improved shelf clock which could be transported more readily. Connecticut clocks were distributed by peddlers all through the country, from Canada to South Carolina and Georgia. The Twiss brothers, manufacturing clocks in Meriden about 1830 and marketing them by peddlers, had one brother stationed in Montreal, another in Nash-
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ville, Tennessee, and a third who divided his time be- tween Meriden and Montreal. When Southern legisla- tures raised peddlers' licenses to a prohibitory level, Jerome shipped clocks in parts to Richmond and as- sembled them there.
A later illustration of this same method of going out after a market was offered by L. Candee and Company of New Haven, innovators in the manufacture of rubber goods. They found people suspicious of the new over- shoes, and introduced them only by carrying them in baskets from one New England city to another, leaving samples to be sold by dealers on commission. Charles Parker of Meriden, known later as the inventor of an improved machinist's vise and the manufacturer of high- grade sporting guns, made his start by manufacturing coffee mills. He would make some stock and would then take to the road and sell it.
President Dwight thought that the peddling of the Berlin tinware demoralized its agents. "Were their manu- factures sold like other merchandize, the profits would undoubtedly be lessened, but the corruption of a consid- erable number of human beings would be prevented." There was certainly a foundation for his criticism; the tin peddler contributed some of the most unpleasant features to that fiction of the Yankee current in other parts of the country, particularly in the South. Their employers, too, would be open to criticism by economic purists of a later time. An early example of an "open price association" designed to check competition was offered by an agreement signed by twelve Meriden tin- ware manufacturers in 1813, in which they bound them- selves not to sell their products below prices set by a list. Even the authors of the Gazetteer, while they defended the people of Connecticut from the charges that they
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were bigoted and litigious, had to concede: "If there are any prevailing or peculiar vices ... an avaricious or mercenary spirit is the most conspicuous"; they "attach an undeserved importance to property."
Interesting as are these opinions, they lie outside the field of this paper, which is designed not to defend the modern business organization, or to apologize for its failings, but rather to trace its growth in connection with the material development of the state. Peddling was, after all, only a passing phase in the development of the market. The report of 1832, published by the federal government, estimated that three quarters of the manu- factured product of Connecticut found its market in New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Providence, and Baltimore. From those cities it was distributed to the interior or exported. When commercial connections of this kind were established the Connecticut manufacturer could divest himself of the responsibility for seeking out the ultimate consumer of his wares. Examples from the history of the Waterbury brass industry show that he need not, on that account, become merely passive in the marketing process. Gordon W. Burnham, at first a farm boy, became a "trunk peddler," made a reputation as a good salesman, was promoted to the control of a wagon and two horses to peddle Meriden tinware, became a partner of Aaron Benedict in the brass business in 1834, and the next year went to New York where he remained, devoting himself to the sales and finances of the firm. Of the two Scovill brothers, one stayed close to the works, organizing and developing the manufacture, while the other became a familiar figure in New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Boston, attending to the outlets for the product.
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VIII
MAKING and marketing must go together for success in manufacturing. If the marketing process has been given priority in this sketch it is because the problem of devel- oping a market under the conditions of the time was really more difficult, and required more courage and energy for its solution than any other that faced the manufacturer. When that was solved he was in a position to improve his processes, lower his prices, and so be able to extend the market still further. The interaction is well illustrated by the history of the clock industry.
In 1807, when Chauncey Jerome was fourteen years old, he wanted to take a place with Eli Terry of Ply- mouth to learn to make clocks, but his guardian dis- suaded him. Terry was making two hundred clocks a year; others were making clocks; "the country would soon be filled with them, and the business would be good for nothing in two or three years." In that very year Terry contracted to deliver four thousand clocks in the next three years, and Jerome himself could boast before 1860 that he had made two hundred thousand in a year.
The clock of colonial days was a work of art, each part of it made separately by the craftsman; and it was so expensive that it marked its owner's affluence. The desire to own a timepiece, both for use and for display, was widespread. Connecticut men realized the opportunity and, early in the nineteenth century, developed ma- chinery which would make clocks in quantity at a mod- erate cost, and a marketing organization which would sell them. The works of these clocks were made of wood, but were turned out in batches, with the teeth of the wheels cut by machinery, and each part true to a gauge, so that all were interchangeable. The price was reduced
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from $25 to $10 or $5 and the number sold grew corre- spondingly. There were obvious objections to the use of wood for the works. The wood had to be carefully selected and seasoned for a year, but still was much affected by moisture. Various makers experimented with brass and in 1838 Jerome invented a one-day clock with brass works, which henceforth became standard. Bristol, the town in which he was then working, reported an output for the year of ten thousand brass-wheel clocks, and ten thousand five hundred wooden-wheel clocks.
An English parliamentary commission which was sent, in 1854, to report on the use of machinery in the United States, was greatly impressed by the factory which Jerome had organized in New Haven. A labor force of two hundred and fifty turned out six hundred clocks a day, to be sold at prices ranging down to $1. Machinery was used wherever possible, making great quantities of parts practically identical; Jerome said that three men could produce all the wheels for five hundred clocks in a day. Each clock passed through the hands of about sixty different workers. The commission noted that the superiority of the manufacture "is not owing to any local advantages; on the contrary labour and material are more expensive than in the countries to which the expor- tations are made; it is to be ascribed solely to the enter- prise and energy of the manufacturer, and his judicious employment of machinery." About half the product was exported to England, and many clocks were then re- exported to other countries. Jerome had entered the English market in 1842, under conditions which realized the ideal of the manufacturer, the goods selling them- selves. The English government, to prevent frauds on the customs by undervaluation, reserved the right to take any shipment by paying the invoiced price plus ten per
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