Industry and Commerce Since the Revolution

Industrial histories of the United States abound. It would be a good idea to read one before you attempt to understand the rise of the factory system in Connecticut. The Harvard Guide to American History will be helpful in choosing one or two to look at. Stuart Bruchey’s Roots of American Economic Growth, 1607-1861 (New York: Harper, 1965), along with Ed­ward Kirkland’s Industry Comes of Age (New York: Holt, Rineheart and Winston, 1961) or the revised edition of Thomas C. Cochran and William Miller’s The Age of Enterprise (New York: Harper, 1961), would do fine. A new multivolume work now in progress, under the series title “A History of Industrial Power in the United States, 1780-1930,” by Louis C. Hunter (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1981 +), takes a technological tack and is perhaps the most interesting of all. Volume I is Waterpower in the Century of the Steam Engine.

See also: Mayr, Otto and Post, Robert C., eds. Yankee Enterprise: The Rise of the American System of Manufactures. Washington, Smithsonian, 1982; and Temin, Peter, ed. Engines of Enterprise: An Economic History of New England. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000. A collection of essays sponsored by the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, this heavily illustrated volume is aimed at a general readership, but is written by sophisticated historians and economists like Bernard Bailyn and Paul Krugman. There is a very favorable review of it in JAH 88 (September 2001) 2:646-47.

There is a vast literature of histories of individual Connecticut industri­al firms, some more useful than others and a few quite significant. Nevertheless, we have not yet developed a set of criteria for selecting those to list, and so have decided to list none. One path through the forest of industrial history is to read the trade and collectors’ literature. Thus one attempting to write definitively about the Connecticut clock industry would scan all issues of such journals as the Bulletin of the National Associ­ation of Watch and Clock Collectors; The American Horologist and Jeweler; The American Antiques Journal; Antiques Magazine; and even the National Button Bulletin.

Connecticut Industry, the journal of the Manufacturers’ Association of Connecticut, began a series of articles on the great industries of Connec­ticut in 1926, to be written by the assistant secretary of the Association, Anna Sands. She wrote one, noted below under “Clocks,” and then res­igned. We can’t find that any more were ever published. Ms. Sands, however, did write “The History of the Manufacturers Association of Con­necticut: An Account of its Growth and Activities for a Quarter-Century,” Connecticut Industry 3(1925)6, 7, 8, 9.

The Census Bureau, of course, has published numerous reports on manufactures since 1790, recently about every five years. Three publica­tions of note are “Report of Steam Engines in the United States,” Execu­tive Documents, Twenty-fifth Congress, Third Session, Vol. II, 21(1840); “Report on the Water-Power of the United States,” U.S. Census Office, Department of the Interior, Tenth Census (1885); and the “Re­port on Manufactures” of 1832, which was reprinted by Burt Franklin (New York, 1969).

John C. Pease and John M. Niles published A Gazetteer of the States of Connecticut and Rhode-Island .... (Hartford: William S. Marsh, 1819), which gives a town-by-town listing of all factories, workforces, and prod­ucts by value in Connecticut. In 1838 the General Assembly ordered Sec­retary of the State Royal R. Hinman to conduct such a survey, but pro­vided no compensation for the town assessors who were to do the work. As a result, fewer than half of them turned in reports. Those which came in are summarized in Report of the Secretary of the State Relating to Certain Branches of Industry (Hartford, 1839), a thirty-eight-page pamphlet. A few years later the new Secretary, Daniel P. Taylor, had better luck. Statistics of the Condition and Products of Certain Branches of Industry in Connecticut for the Year Ending 1845 (Hartford: J. L. Boswell, 1846) is complete. It follows the format, with additions and refinements, of the Pease and Niles. Wil­liam A. Countryman prepared a forty-five-page synopsis for the U.S. Bu­reau of the Census, Census of Manufactures: Connecticut, 1914 (Washington, 1917). The best way to draw a profile of industry in Connecticut today is to analyze the occupational statistics in the publication of the United States Department of Commerce, Detailed Characteristics: Connecticut which is based on the decennial census and follows it by a few years.

There are four doctoral dissertations that treat the recent period;

Cooke, Jr., Edward S. Making Furniture in Preindustrial America: The Social Economy of Newtown and Woodbury, Connecticut. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1996. Originating as a Boston University dissertation (1984), this study covers the era 1760-1820. "Social economy affirms the conscious decisions of households . . . about resource allocation for production and exchange. The demands of craft processes and the demand for the craft product often guided decisions about household activities and relations, consumption, and involvement with the market." (p. 5)

Hoke, Robert Donald. "Ingenious Yankees, the Rise of the American System of Manufacturers in the Private Sector," Dissertation, U of Wisc. 1984, pub. By Columbia Univ. Press. Long chapters, often dealing with technical detail, discuss Connecticut-based clock and ax manufacture. Two other chapters, on typewriters and watches, do not deal with Connecticut. Hoke is concerned with industries that developed mass production and interchangable parts construction and that grew without government assistance by subsidy, large-scale purchase, or any other method. The work is fascinating because of its breezy style and despite a plethora of technical detail. Hoke is a museum person and his dissertation owed much to his work at the Smithsonian.

Niemi, Albert William, Jr. “New England: Gross State Product and Productivity, 1948-65.” University of Connecticut, 1969. “The advance of productivity in New England is compared to the national average, and the experience of the several states is examined with respect to the overall regional performance. “In most of the industry series, New England lagged behind the United States in the advance of real output during the postwar period. Only Connecticut, of the New England States, has attained [as of 1965] a postwar growth that compares favorably to that obtained in the nation.” (from the abstract)

Turoff, Sidney. “Growth of Manufacturing in Connecticut, 1958-63.” SUNY at Buffalo, 1970. “Growth has been defined as the change in the value of an economic variable in the state relative to either the nation or the New England region.

“It was found that relatively high annual compensation levels in Connecticut were the result of concentrated employment in high wage industries, wherever they are located. In terms of dollar amounts of labor input relative to output, Connecticut is a high-wage area.” (from the abstract)

The industrial history of Connecticut has been treated professionally by Grace Pierpont Fuller in An Introduction to the History of Connecticut as a Manufacturing State, based on a Smith College dissertation and pub­lished as No. 1 of Smith College Studies in History (Northampton: Smith College, 1915). It is a most valuable work of first reference. Fuller em­phasizes the relationship between industry and urbanization and draws a great deal of her material from the census and statistical reports listed above. This is a clear and untechnical description of Connecticut’s pheno­menal nineteenth-century industrial growth.

Fuller’s monograph is unaccountably omitted from the brief bibliog­raphy listed by George B. Chandler in “Industrial History,” his 450-page contribution to Volume IV of Osborn’s History of Connecticut in Monog­raphic Form (New York, 1925), but Chandler’s long essay is an excellent summary of the subject. The bibliography and appendix are separated from the essay and found on page 442, following a short article on oys­ters.

Volume II of The New England States, edited by William T. Davis (Bos­ton: D. C. Hurd, 1897) is devoted to Connecticut. The pieces, though very dry, are well informed. This volume includes articles on the industry of Connecticut’s major cities—and of some not so major, such as Westport. The essays occupy 254 pages and carry the story to 1897, with emphasis on the end of the century. A brief summary for about the same period is William A. Countryman’s “Connecticut’s Position in the Manufacturing World,” in Connecticut Magazine 7(1902)3:323-27. Countryman was a statistician with the Census Bureau in Washington and a prominent Hartford citizen and member of the City Council. A very brief sketch was published as Tercentenary pamphlet XLIV (1935) by Clive Day, The Rise of Manufacturing in Connecticut, 1820-1850. Day was a professor of economic history at Yale, and this little work includes materials on wages and prices and laboring conditions during the three decades covered.

Other statistical treatments:

Hartford Board of Trade. Hartford, Connecticut as a Manufacturing, Business and Commercial Center.... Hartford: Board of Trade, 1889.

Jones, A. D. The Illustrated Commercial, Mechanical, Professional and Statistical Gazet­teer and Business Book of Connecticut for 1857-8. New Haven: T.J. Stafford, 1857. Intended to be an annual; no more published.

New York Industrial Record. Special Number Descriptive of and Illustrating the Naugatuck

Valley, the Industrial Hive of Connecticut. New York: New York Indus­trial Recorder, 1899.

Webb, W. S. Historical, Statistical, and Industrial Review of the State of Connecticut. New York: W. S. Webb, 1883. Organized by counties and towns, this work pro­vides a long paragraph about each industry of any size in each town.

An interesting work that we have found useful is Robert G. Le Blanc’s Location of Manufacturing in New England in the 19th Century (Hanover, Mass.: Center for the Study of Social Change; Geography Publications No. 7, Dartmouth College, 1969), based on Le Blanc’s doctoral disserta­tion of the same title (University of Minnesota, 1968). Le Blanc analyzes the changes in location of manufacturing centers brought about by the concentration of power after the increase in the use of steam and the rise of railroad transportation. He provides charts showing the relative posi­tions of all the major New England manufacturing towns in 1850 and 1900.

The job of locating industrial centers in early-nineteenth-century Con­necticut has been rather completely accomplished by Ellsworth S. Grant and Arthur Huges in “Connecticut ‘Villes,’“ CHS Bulletin 35(April, 1970)2:33-64. Walter C. McKain and Nathan L. Whetten, Occupational and Industrial Diversity in Rural Connecticut, 1787-1948 (Storrs: University of Connecticut, 1949) is a pamphlet issued by the Storrs Agricultural Ex­periment Station. James K. Finch’s A Brief History of Industrial Development in Connecticut (New York, 1948) has an interesting title but is unavailable at the State Library or at Yale. A short, scholarly piece of interest is David R. Meyer’s “Connecticut as a Regional Industrial Complex,” in Proceed­ings of the New England-St. Lawrence Valley Geographical Society X(October, 1980): Settlement In New England: The Last 100 Years, Timothy J. Richard, ed., pp. 7-9.  Ellsworth Strong Grant’s Yankee Dreamers and Doers (Chester: Pequot Press, 1975), a sketch of nineteenth-century Connec­ticut inventors, industrialists, peddlers, and mill towns, is a popular work. Vigg Edward Bird’s thirty-five-page pamphlet, Connecticut Industry (Hartford: the Newcomen Society, 1937), is an ill-informed, even foolish, speech by the then president of the Hartford Electric Company.

Two pamphlets in the Bicentennial series not noted elsewhere deserve space here.

Kuslan, Louis I. Connecticut Science, Technology and Medicine in the Era of the Ameri­can Revolution. Pamphlet XXVII (1978). Has chapters on science at Yale, colo­nial surveyors, mining, etc. It is a difficult collection of topics to give focus to. See also Kuslan’s “Science, Technology and Medicine in 18th-Century Con­necticut.” Connecticut Review, IX(November, 1975)1:27-38.

Walsh, James P. Connecticut Industry and the Revolution. Pamphlet XXIX (1978). While emphasizing the importance of domestic industry before the Revolu­tion, Walsh points out that though the War stimulated local manufacture, especially of clothing, it did not bring about an industrial revolution. There is an excellent bibliography for the study of American industry in the late-eighteenth century.

Other articles dealing with Connecticut industry in a general way:

Blake, Henry T. “Eli Whitney Blake: Scientist and Inventor.” Papers of the NHCHS 8(1914):36-55. Blake, a nephew of Eli Whitney, ran the arms man­ufactory after Whitney’s death. Blake’s stone crusher, which he patented in 1858, revolutionized road-building worldwide.

Dickerson, Wayne R. Rediscovery of Connecticut. Hartford: Connecticut Chamber of Commerce, 1958. A group of newspaper articles celebrating such Connec­ticut industries as aircraft, typewriters, and insurance. A negligible work.

Gies, Joseph, and Gies, Frances. The Ingenious Yankees. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1976. A popular treatment of inventors. Connecticut people get full measure: John Fitch, Eli Whitney, Samuel Colt, Charles Goodyear, Samuel F. B. Morse, Elias Howe, etc. Sound and interesting.

Kirby, Richard Shelton, ed. Inventors and Engineers of Old New Haven. New Haven:

NHCHS, 1939. A series of six lectures given at the Yale School of Engineering, each by a different authority. They include “Eli Whitney,” “Early Yale and New Haven Inventors and Engineers,” “Formative Years of New Haven Public Utilities,” and “Founding of Sheffield Scientific School.” Twenty-five illustra­tions and a modest index.

Oleson, Alexandra, and Brown, Sanborn G., eds. The Pursuit of Knowledge in the Early American Republic: American Scientific and Learned Societies from Colonial Times to the Civil War. Published as Proceedings of the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Science. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976. This work pays considerable attention to Connecticut scientific figures.

Roe, Joesph Wicham. Connecticut Inventors. Tercentenary pamphlet XXXIII (1934). The ratio of patents to population was higher by far in the United States than anywhere else in the world. And up to the time this pamphlet was written, it was higher in Connecticut than anywhere else in the United States. Climate, capital, water, and power explain it, says Roe—and, oh yes, race. “The Connecticut mechanics in the main traced back to the middle class English, the people who brought about the Industrial Revolution and who have led Europe industrially to this day [1934].” (p.3)

See also Chapter 9, “A Manufacturing Spirit,” in Saladino, cited above, and Glenn Weaver, “Industry in an Agrarian Economy,” cited elsewhere.

Supplementary to the 1880 census of water power there were several works that looked at that vitally important aspect of industry in Connec­ticut. The most accessible is a fascinating study, by a pair of engineers, of the nineteenth-century water power sites in the seventeen towns of the Housatonic River watershed: Kenneth T. Howell and Einar W. Carlson, Empire Over the Dam (Chester: Pequot Press, 1974). Another work by an engineer is Richard Martin’s “Connecticut’s Thousand Dams and Their Effect upon Water Resources,” in Annual Report of the Connecticut Soci­ety of Civil Engineers (1951), pp. 134-63. This essay includes much valu­able historical data pulled together from published sources, and a list of colonial and early national dams.

The Society for Industrial Archeology published, with sponsorship by the Smithsonian and the Connecticut Historical Commission, Connecticut: An Inventory of Historic Engineering and Industrial Sites, by Matthew Roth, with Bruce Clouette and Victor Damell (Washington, D.C., 1981). This work, organized by counties, lists and describes some 450 industrial sites, bridges, dams, and other “historic engineer­ing” sites that are still in condition to be observed and studied. Each site is described in a long paragraph or two, and many are accompanied by illustrations. This is a wealth of information about Connecticut’s material development in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. See also Connecticut’s Historic Engineering Record: An Inventory of Early Industrial Sites and Engineering Artifacts, published by the History and Heritage Committee (Hartford Section) of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME, Hartford Section, Box 235, Wethersfield, 1976). This work is a mine of information not only about water power sites but also about mines, furnaces, etc. Unlike the Roth work, it lists all sorts of sites, whether any remains exist or not. It includes sites back to the seventeenth century, but lists them without the extensive descriptions of Roth.

There are four studies of particular waterpower sites:

Baruett, M. H. “The Farmington River and its Tributaries.” Connecticut Quarterly 3(1897)3:325-44. Wonderful photographs of the river, especially in its indus­trial applications as they were in 1897.

Engelhardt, Fred. Fulling Mill Brook: A Study in Industrial Evolution, 1707-1937. Brattleboro: Stephen Daye Press, 1937. Fulling Mill Brook flows into the Naugatuck River at Naugatuck. An interesting microstudy tinged with nostal­gia. Many illustrations of water and steam power mechanisms and applica­tions. Fifty-five pages.

Hawley, Emily C. The River of Many Falls. Brookfield: the author, 1928. A little pamphlet about Nathan Hawley, a pioneer of Brookfield, with a page each on the four Housatonic River power sites.

Straight, Stephen M. “Kent Falls.” CHS Bulletin 37(January, 1972)1:10-16. More nice photographs and an analysis of the falls as a power source.