Brass

The arms and machine-tool industries stimulated the new science of metallurgy in the nineteenth century, and again Connecticut innovators were significant. The economically most important metal produced in Connecticut was brass. In 1926, two-thirds of the nation’s brass was produced in and around Waterbury, and brass constituted one-eighth of all Connecticut industrial product by value. Though not a modern economic study, and though short on the consolidation movement of the turn of the century, William G. Lathrop’s The Brass Industry in the United States: A Study of the Origins and Development of the Brass Industry in the Naugatuck Valley and its Subsequent Extension over the Nation (Mount Carmel, Conn.: the author, rev. ed., 1926) is a well-supported narrative-descriptive ac­count. It is not analytical or very critical, but it is full of information and citations, with a bibliography and modest index. Lathrop also wrote shorter works: The Brass Industry in Connecticut (Shelton, Conn.: the au­thor, 1909) and Tercentenary pamphlet XLIX (1936), The Development of the Brass Industry in Connecticut. This last work includes a chart showing the “genealogy” of the Naugatuck brass industry—that is, which com­panies swallowed which in the great consolidations at the end of the nineteenth century that culminated in the formation of the American Brass Company in 1899. Lathrop had a Ph.D. from Yale, but he spent his life as a Congregational minister.

Another short work is Charles H. Warren’s “History of the Brass In­dustry in the Naugatuck Valley,” Papers of the NHCHS 10(1951):240-57. The author. Dean of the Sheffield Scientific School, read this paper in 1936. In 1981 the Mattatuck Historical Society staged an exhibit, “Metals, Minds, and Machines: Waterbury at Work,” and published a catalog of text and pictures that sheds much light on the business, with special at­tention to the point of view of the laborer. It was written and compiled under the direction of Cecelia Bucki. The most recent major work on the subject is Brass Valley: The Story of Working People’s Lives and Struggles in an American Industrial Region, by The Brass Workers History Project, com­piled and edited by Jeremy Brecher, Jerry Lombardi, and Jan Stackhouse (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1982). Transcripts of interviews and more than a hundred photographs, old and new, focus on workers’ lives and efforts at labor organization. See also John A. Coe, “The Development of the Brass Industry,” Annual Report of the Connecticut Soci­ety of Civil Engineers (1939), pages 83-103. The author was president of the American Brass Company. The focus of this piece is copper, the prin­cipal alloy in brass.