USA > Connecticut > Tercentenary pamphlet series, v. 3 The Beginnings of Roman Catholicism in Connecticut > Part 9
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cent. They exercised this right on one of Jerome's ship- ments; then on another, as the prices at which the clocks were invoiced seemed incredibly low. When they found clocks still coming at the same low prices they became discouraged and let Jerome's agents take over the re- sponsibility of making the sales.
The English visitors of 1854 found in the Davenport and Mallory works of New Haven the methods used in the clock industry practiced also in the manufacture of locks and padlocks. Special machinery turned out inter- changeable parts, reducing costs and thereby extending sales. The works turned out daily two thousand padlocks selling at 5c. apiece, and offered a dozen locks, each with a different key, for 50c.
Before this system of manufacture with interchange- able parts had been applied to clocks and locks, it had been introduced in the manufacture of firearms by Eli Whitney and Simeon North. Whitney announced a new principle, "the great leading object of which is to sub- stitute correct and effective operations of machinery for that skill of the artist which is acquired only by long practice and experience; a species of skill which is not possessed in this country to any considerable extent." What Whitney did in essence was to put the brains of a great inventor into a machine which would then, in the hands of an ordinary workman, turn out products of a high degree of refinement. The milling machine-in which the tool revolves instead of the object operated on, as in a lathe-was devised by him before 1818, and proved to be an indispensable instrument in the manu- facture of small parts exact to gauge. The new methods, used first for Whitney muskets and North pistols, were applied later to Sharps rifles and Colt revolvers. Colt's armory at Hartford, built in 1854-1855, was the acme of
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equipment of its time; automatic and semiautomatic machinery reduced handwork to the bare minimum. Colt estimated that in the manufacture of his revolver eighty per cent of the product was to be ascribed to the machines; he allowed ten per cent to the machine tenders and another ten per cent to the skilled workmen em- ployed in assembling and finishing. Again the English visitors exclaimed at the novelty and the efficiency of the methods of manufacture. Nothing amazed them more, apparently, than the statement made to them at Spring- field that "good shooting could be made at 200 yards with the United States Service musket," as they knew that "the English musket was next to useless at that distance."
Compared with other industries in Connecticut the manufacture of firearms was relatively unimportant. In 1840 it employed only 148 workers; even in 1860 it counted only 869, considerably less than the number working on brass or making hats, and not one tenth of the number employed in making cotton goods. It had a significance, however, far beyond the measure of these figures. It taught manufacturers in many different lines the possibilities of the machine. And in spreading the demand for machines it built up the industry making them, the machine-tool trade, parent of all modern manufacture.
The industries so far reviewed were not the most im- portant. As indicated in the last paragraph they em- ployed fewer hands and produced less value than other industries of the state. They have been selected for description because they showed originality. Bold spirits introduced new methods of making and marketing goods, overcame the natural disadvantages to which the Con- necticut manufacturer was subject, and taught other people that they too might succeed if they would aban_
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don traditional ways and strike out in new lines. The example set by them was followed by others like them in the succeeding period, and led to industrial success.
IX
OTHER industries, in which the manufacturers were con- tent to be followers rather than leaders, held no such promise for the future. In 1845 the textile industry was the most important in Connecticut, measured either by the number of employees or by the value of the product. It would be unfair to deny the contributions which indi- vidual citizens of the state have made to the development of this industry, in the way of technical and economic improvements. In labor relations General David Hum- phreys of Humphreysville (now Seymour) was a fine figure who alone would give some distinction to Con- necticut's earlier industrial history. It would be unfair, too, not to recognize the superior advantages of districts in the East: better climate for cotton spinning, better water power close to means of water transport, more abundant capital. At any rate, it seems certain that from the original germ of American cotton manufacture in Pawtucket the spirit of progress spread to Waltham and Lowell; and that Connecticut remained an imitator rather than an innovator. The report of 1832 showed textile factories scattered all over the state: ninety-eight producing various sorts of woolen goods, ninety-four producing cotton yarn or cloth. Of the factories working on wool, apart from two carpet works in Enfield (Thomp- sonville) and Simsbury (Tariffville), most employed only about a score of workers, some a dozen or less. Of the cotton mills for which particulars are given, over half had less than a thousand spindles apiece, tended by a score or so of operatives, mostly women.
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The life history of one of these little cotton factories was furnished by the replies to a questionnaire given by its proprietor, J. Green of Goshen. It was started in 1812, in the boom period of the early cotton manufacture. "This establishment failed when peace took place, and has been in so many hands that no estimate can be made as to profits 'till 1831; generally those that run it failed in business; no profit made 'till 1831, when yarn took a rise." It employed four men at an average wage of 84c. a day, eight women at 2s. (34c.), eight children at 20c., and ran twelve hours a day. The manufacturer bartered part of the yarn for country produce at the factory, and sent the remainder to market, twenty-seven to forty miles, probably to Hartford and New Haven. Asked, "Is there any pursuit in which you could engage from which you could derive greater profit?" the answer was, "Yes, farming or labor by the day, or any kind of business that could be done without loss." This little factory and many others like it had been started to supply yarn to the country people to be woven into cloth at home, and obviously was doomed to extinction as factory-made cloth robbed it of its local market. Connecticut was not different from other New England states in harboring still those hopeless ventures. It was, however, different from some of its neighbors in its failure to develop large plants, equipped with the latest machinery, producing cloth as well as yarn, and having the advantages both in making and in marketing that attend the mass produc- tion of standardized wares. There were some enterprises of this calibre: the Thames Manufacturing Company of Norwich, and the Windham Manufacturing Company of Willimantic, each turning out over a million yards of cotton cloth a year. Good management enabled these and other somewhat smaller establishments not only to hold
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their ground in competition with more favored neighbors, but even to grow in size and importance. Connecticut, however, could not contest the leadership in the industry which had been assumed so early by Rhode Island and Massachusetts.
Next in importance to the textile industries, at the time of the report of 1845 on the manufactures of the state, was the boot and shoe trade.2 It gave employment to 4,695 persons, more than were employed in any other industry except the textiles-more, in fact, than were employed in all the following industries taken together: brass articles, buttons, clocks, cutlery, firearms, locks, machinery, pins, screws, steam engines and boilers, tin- ware, and mechanics' tools. The manufacture of boots and shoes was so extensive because it was so simple, requiring few tools and little skill. Most of the work was done in the home of the worker. Both men and women engaged in it in about equal numbers. The industry was almost ubiquitous. The report of 1845 showed that it was carried on in more than a hundred towns. Mere villages, with a population below one thousand, such as Chaplin, Lisbon, and Union, reported outputs measured in tens of thousands of pairs. The state as a whole in 1845 produced over four hundred thousand pairs of boots, over twelve hundred thousand pairs of shoes, of a total value over $1,800,000.
2 Figures in the text are based on an independent tabulation of the statistics in the report of 1845. In that report the town of Woodstock, with a total population of 3,053, was said to have 9,825 engaged in the manufacture, and to have an output of shoes several times the total of all the rest of the state. On the other hand the value assigned to the product, $68,045.80, seems reasonable; even in 1832 West Woodstock was making 30,000 pairs of shoes a year. Accepting the figure of value and applying rough averages based on figures for the rest of the state, there are assigned to the town 186 workers and an output of 48,919 pairs of shoes. For other industries the summary of the report has been accepted without checking its accuracy.
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Some of the shoemakers supplied local needs, and presumably worked to the measure of the customer. A large part of the output, however, consisted of "brogans," selling for less than $1 a pair, of crude material and con- struction, designed for the wear of slaves on the Southern plantations. There was no problem in marketing these goods. The demand of the South reached through New York and the interior cities to penetrate even to farms in the back country, where the family could employ its spare time on something that would bring it the cash or store credit which it needed so keenly and found so hard to acquire.
The manufacture of boots and shoes has disappeared from Connecticut, leaving scarcely a trace. In the form in which it was carried on it was purely a hand trade, sup- ported by an indigent population ready to work for wages which even then were regarded as low. The future of the industry lay in Massachusetts, where a more efficient organization and supervision of the workers and the application of machinery left the old handicraft methods hopelessly behind. Even in 1845 the single towns of Lynn or Haverhill each turned out more shoes than the whole state of Connecticut.
Another industry, much less important but deserving mention here because its fate was similar, was the manu- facture of combs. A number of towns reported this manu- facture in 1845, and it gave employment to more workers than were engaged in making locks or firearms, almost as many as in those two industries together. The comb manufacturers of Meriden reported that they got their raw materials from India, Africa, and Turkey, and sold their product not only in the United States but also in Canada and South America. One of them could signalize the quality of the young women who worked for him by
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the fact that within a few years eight of them had con- tracted marriages with clergymen. The comb manufac- ture was killed, as was that of shoes, by the superior efficiency of neighbors; Massachusetts combmakers com- bined labor and capital in larger units, and won the market away from the little local producers.
X
THIS survey of the adolescent period of Connecticut in- dustries would be incomplete if it attended only to the more important manufactures which have already been noted. Behind them in the background was a bewildering variety of little enterprises, scattered all over the state, often in the smallest villages. Sharon and Watertown made mousetraps by the hundred thousand. Brooklyn manufactured ten thousand pairs of spectacles a year. Woodbridge made five hundred dozen iron candlesticks. North Haven and Wallingford made razor strops by the thousand dozen. Chester manufactured thousands of dozens of inkstands; Manchester made ink to fill them, as well as blacking and shaving soap. The gimlet bit invented by the Reverend Russell Jennings had already established the reputation of Connecticut for such tools, and gimlets, augers, and various sorts of bits were re- ported from a number of towns. Prospect already had thirty people employed in the manufacture of friction matches, and a Westville organization of a later period, the Diamond Match Company, has given its name to the great corporation of the present day. Ledyard and Red- ding made sieves by the thousand dozen. Benjamin Gilbert in 1818 devised a loom to weave haircloth for sieves, and started manufacture in the basement of his house, his wife tending the loom. About 1830 he had salesmen all over New England to market his product.
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In 1837 he experimented in the weaving of wire cloth on a carpet loom; in 1865 the wire cloth was being woven on power looms; in 1906 the factory at Redding had over five hundred employees.
The town of Canton, to take a sample of the time, with a population under two thousand dispersed in several villages, had already in 1845 an axe factory employing one hundred and seventy-five hands, which was destined to make the name of Collinsville known throughout Central and South America; it had the usual shops for the supply of local needs in saddlery, harness, and trunks, wagons and sleighs, cabinet work and furniture; it had its tannery and petty shoe manufacture; and in addition had a metal button factory turning out twenty-five thousand gross, a little factory making lead pipe, and a powder mill.
Another illustration of the varied experiments in manufacture which marked the period was afforded by Harwinton, with a population not much over one thou- sand. The historian of that little town enumerated as manufactures produced there for export: fur hats, silk hats, palm-leaf hats, clocks, clock dials, flutes, fifes, tin-plate ware, bricks, cloth garments, woolen cloth, saddlery, cabinet furniture, veneering stuff, pleasure carriages, saddles, harnesses.
Most of these little enterprises failed. While the farmer was sure of at least a scanty living, the manufacturer, in trusting his fortunes to the market, must take his chances. Energy and ability alone were not enough to guarantee success; there were too many incalculable factors. Even such success as could be anticipated in this period must still be of a modest kind. The authors of the Gazetteer spoke with emphasis on this subject. "Whatever expectations may be indulged by the inexperienced, it is a fact, established by the united testimony of all men of
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practical knowledge, that the great majority of those engaged in business of every kind, can realize but small profits. This is more emphatically true with respect to mechanical employments of every description." The great successes achieved in certain branches of manufac- ture in this period were exceptional, and affected rela- tively few people. Down even to the Civil War conditions remained much the same.
XI
BESIDES the variety of the manufactures attempted, another feature of the period which deserves emphasis was the fluidity of industry, the frequency of change, whether in the plant itself or in its ownership. The same water power would be used at one time for a fulling mill, later for an oil mill or a gristmill, and then to run a little textile factory. When the capital invested had become so considerable that the owner felt he could not afford to scrap it, he would sell the enterprise as a going concern to someone who would attempt to turn his failure into a success. Some of these little factories seem to have changed hands every few years. The man who had failed once had only got started. The man who succeeded was the one who, after failure, made a fresh start until he had found a business to which he was suited, and for which the times were ripe.
Even then Connecticut was the home of small wares, "Yankee notions." The equipment needed for their manufacture was so slight that the nature of the product could readily be shifted to suit the market. About the middle of the century William Hall of Meriden began the manufacture of suspenders in his house, continued it in a shop which he built, added carpetbags to his line of products as a demand sprang up for them, sold that part
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of his business to another, formed a new partnership for the manufacture of tape measures and sewing birds, sold out to his partner, and invested his money in a hotel in which to spend the rest of his life. Frederick T. Stanley made a name for the suspenders which he manufactured by sending a pair to President Jackson on his election, receiving an autograph letter in acknowledgment. He left this business to build up a great factory of hardware and tools in New Britain; his successors in the original shop went into the manufacture of stocks and, when the demand for that form of neckwear declined about 1840, into making shirts. Oliver Winchester trained as a car- penter, then a master builder in different places, went into the trade of men's furnishings in Baltimore in 1834, and in 1847 took advantage of the newly invented sewing machine to build up a large shirt factory in New Haven. There English visitors were impressed to see one woman turning out the product of a dozen to twenty working with needle and thimble, and often finishing the esti- mated daily stint by two in the afternoon. Winchester, in 1855, transferred his ability and part of the capital which he had acquired to the manufacture of repeating firearms, and started the factory which was later to make his name known all over the world.
This period of Connecticut industry extending down to the decade 1840-50, was a period of experiment, of trial and error, of natural selection. All imaginable forms of manufacture, one may say with slight exaggeration, were tried out. Those which were adapted to the condi- tions survived. These did not, however, grow up by any irresistible vitality of their own. They were established by persistent effort. The manufacturer had to learn new methods of making goods, new methods of marketing them, if he would extend his business. He could not
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afford to stand still or another manufacturer, through more vigorous efforts, would drive him from the market. The struggle for existence involved not only industries and methods but also men. Most industries required but a small amount of capital for their start. It was a period of democratic ideals and general education; in 1840, of Connecticut's total white population of 301,856, only 526 aged over twenty years were unable to read and write. A young man of courage and ability had an un- matched opportunity to rise from the ranks and take control. This was the period in which were founded enter- prises destined later to grow into great corporations of commanding importance in their field of industry. Many of the successful manufacturing establishments were the creations of keen, thrifty men who began as actual workers at the trade concerned.
XII
THE turning point in the economic history of the state is found, as was said at the beginning of this paper, in the decade closing in 1850. Then the population of Connecti- cut began first to grow at a rate comparable with that of the rest of the country, instead of lagging far behind. The attraction of the West had likewise diminished as the parts readily accessible with existing means of transport had been occupied. The arrival of an increased number of immigrants at the end of the decade likewise played a part. Shifts in emigration and immigration, however, give no sufficient explanation of this abrupt change in the rate of growth; these shifts were part of the process and must themselves be explained. Nothing less than a trans- formation in the economic structure of the state, a sudden turn from agriculture to manufacture and trade, could account for this new vitality.
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The statistics of the national censuses of 1840 and 1850 can be trusted only for bare figures of population. The statistics of occupations are imperfect. If they are taken at their face value, comparing groups represented in both enumerations, there was an increase in Connecticut in the number occupied in trade, manufacture, and mining of nearly eight thousand. The statistics of agriculture would show an absolute loss of over twenty-five thousand persons. Taking comparable groups the proportion of the whole engaged in agriculture would show a drop from sixty-one per cent to thirty-four per cent. Such a cata- clysmic reversal of the previous conditions is incredible and does not accord with evidence derived from other sources. Without stopping here to consider possible cor- rections which might be made in the census figures one may dismiss them as extravagant, and still believe that they showed the real trend, however much they exag- gerated it.
The agency which was destined in the course of time to turn the poverty of Connecticut into riches was the rail- road. Was it already responsible for the shift in occupa- tions marking the decade ending in 1850? The only rail- road built early enough to have much effect in this decade was the line from New Haven to Hartford, opened to traffic in 1840 and extended to Springfield in 1844. The roads built next in time, from New Haven to Plain- ville and beyond, from New Haven to New York, and from Bridgeport up the Naugatuck Valley, were opened to traffic in 1848 and 1849; all-rail lines from the eastern seaboard to the Mississippi valley were established shortly after 1850.
Studying the population of Connecticut towns at the beginning and at the end of the decade, one finds, it is true, that those along the railroad from New Haven to
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Hartford and Springfield were growing fast. Most of the increase, however, fell to the two capital cities, and other large towns in the state, on the shore of the Sound, on rivers, and even in the interior, away from a railroad, were growing at an equal or a higher rate. These large towns could subsist only by "traffic," by trade and manufacture. Taking the state as a whole it seems clear that its people, even before the railroad could have exercised any great in- fluence, had at last solved the problem of making a living here without resort to the soil, and had turned to manu- facturing as the hope of their future.
"In the past," says Edward A. Filene,3 "New England commercial leadership was due, more than to any other factor, to being the first in the field." When conditions of manufacture and trade were still most difficult, Con- necticut had founded its industries and had established their markets. Trained in a period of adversity the manufacturers of the state were admirably prepared to take advantage of the period of prosperity which ensued. Then the spread of the railroad opened to them the richest market in the world, and enabled them to raise Con- necticut to a leading position among the industrial states of the nation.
3 In New England's prospect: 1933 (New York, American Geographic Society, 1933).
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Bibliographical Note
GRACE P. FULLER, Introduction to the history of Con- necticut as a manufacturing state (Smith College studies in history, Northampton, Mass., 1915) is a scholarly monograph, largely statistical. George B. Chandler, Industrial history (in Norris G. Osborn, History of Connecticut in monographic form, New York, 1925, vol. 4, pp. 1-451) is readable and reliable, an admirable piece of work. Both these works contain bibliographies, with references to books on particular industries.
The most important statistical sources are: John C. Pease and John M. Niles, Gazetteer of the states of Con- necticut and Rhode Island (Hartford, 1819); Documents relative to the manufactures in the United States (22d Congress, Ist Session, House Document 308, 2 vols., Washington, 1833, vol. I, pp. 977-1050); Secretary of state of Connecticut: Report relative to certain branches of industry (1839); Daniel P. Tyler, secretary of state of Connecticut, Statistics of . . . industry in Connecticut (1846). Valuable descriptive accounts are found in Report on the New York Industrial Exhibition and Report on the machinery of the United States (British parliamentary papers, 1854).
Local histories and biographies contain some of the best illustrative material. Also, see Joseph W. Roe, Connecticut inventors (no. XXXIII in this series); P. R. Hoopes, Early clockmaking in Connecticut (no. XXIII); and Albert L. Olson, Agricultural economy and the popu- lation in eighteenth-century Connecticut (no. XL).
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XLV The First Twenty Years of Railroads in Connecticut
SIDNEY WITHINGTON
PUBLISHED FOR THE TERCENTENARY COMMISSION BY THE YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS 1935
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