Miscellaneous Industries

A few miscellaneous items relating to various industries are listed here.

Brooks, A. F. “New Haven, Birthplace of the World’s First Commercial Tele­phone Exchange.” Papers of the NHCHS 10(1951):204-25. Brooks sketches the United States, Connecticut, and New Haven on January 28,1878 and then moves on to describe the opening of the telephone exchange in New Haven. He also offers some “high spots of early telephone development.” If you’re eas­ily excited, you might find this mildly interesting.

Briggs, John Owen. Notes on Some Early Connecticut Paper Mills. 1766 to 1793. Columbiad Club Keepsake No. 13 (n. p., n. d.) About ten mill operators and their mills, described in paragraphs of a few lines to whole pages. A twelve-page pamphlet.

Hegel, Richard. Carriages from New Haven: New Haven’s Nineteenth-Century Carriage Industry. Hamden: Archon Books, 1974. Carriage-making was an important industry in New Haven; local factories supplied parts and completed carriages to all pans of die United States. This short book is an excellent survey of the business.

Ives, J. Moss. “Danbury Leads the World in Hatting: Historical Study of the Be­ginning and Development of a Remarkable Industry.” Connecticut Magazine 7(1902)4:627-50. A description of particular interest because it was written in the year of the strike that led to the famous Danbury hatters’ case, Loewe v. Lawtor 208 U.S. 274 (1908), in which the United States Supreme Court declared the strikers guilty of violating terms of the Sherman Antitrust Act, ruining the lives of some 191 families and bringing about the eventual collapse of the in­dustry in Danbury.

Kingsbury, Frederick J. “The Development of an Organized Industry.” Journal of Social Science 28(1891):59-65. The author discusses sixty years of the shoe and boot industry in Waterbury and its effect on the laboring man.

Taber, Martha Van Hoesen. A History of the Cutlery Industry in the Connecticut Valley. No. 41 of the Smith College Studies in History. Northampton, Mass.: Smith College, 1955.  A doctoral dissertation with full scholarly apparatus. Much at­tention given to Connecticut companies. The story is carried up to the post-World War II era.

Thayer, Albert L. “The Axe and How it is Made.” Connecticut Quarterly 2(April-June, 1896)2:141-52. Thayer, a newspaper reporter, does not identify the fac­tory, but the Collinsville factory, the major producer of axes in the world, was nearby in South Canton. This is a great article, heavily illustrated.

Villalon, L. J., and Laux, J. M. “Steaming Through New England with Locomobile.” Journal of Transportation History 5(September, 1979):65-82. The Locomobile Company in Bridgeport first demonstrated the need for (or at least the saleability of) a lightweight, inexpensive automobile before Ford and all the rest. Between 1899 and 1903, more than 5,000 Locomobiles were sold. A nice, non-technical piece.

Wiley, Clarance N. “Early Cement Manufacture in Connecticut.” Annual Report of the Connecticut Society of Civil Engineers (July, 1933): 129-45. The indus­try was developed locally in the Southington area.

See also Frederick Shennan, Early Connecticut Artists, cited elsewhere.

It is clear from the nondescript nature of the collection of works above that a good study of individual industries in Connecticut cannot be made solely from our lists. There are three genres of works omitted from this bibliography that will be of more help. One is company histories, of which there are a few good ones. There are also mountains of trash, but even the most blatantly self-centered and over-inflated company encomium can yield insights to the trained historians willing to wade through the garbage. A second group of works is city directories, which in the hands of professionals can be made to read like storybooks. (See the index for location of a discussion of city directories.) A third genre is made up of town histories, of which there are several for every major Connecticut city, some of which—such as Constance M. Green’s work on Naugatuck (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1948)—are superb. Serious research­ers are directed to those materials.