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2. An Opportunity for Each

COLONEL POPE COMES TO TOWN AND HELPS BUILD AN INDUSTRIAL POWERHOUSE

One cool spring day in 1878, a Boston train pulled in to Hartford’s Italianate station with a spindly, top-heavy bicycle that would change manufacturing forever. The year had already seen incredible mechanical advances. A commercial telephone exchange built with carriage bolts and teapot handles had opened in New Haven.¹ Thomas Edison had applied for a patent for his cylinder phonograph after testing it by recording the nursery rhyme “Mary Had a Little Lamb.”² John Philip Holland had launched a submarine in New Jersey.³ Modernity was being birthed down a canal of wires and plugs. It was simply looking for the proper delivery room.

In 1850 Hartford’s population was 13,555. By 1870 the population had more than doubled to nearly 38,000; by 1890, to 53,230. The town by 1900 boasted nearly 80,000 residents—an increase of six times over—and the town’s boundary bulged west.

What had happened? Industry. Manufacturing came to Frog Hollow, and with it, innovators, planners, immigrants, and farmers anxious to step away from their plows and work at a job where their fortunes were not ruled by the weather.⁴

Starting in the 1850s and for a little over a half century, Frog Hollow was the center of a stunning array of factories that helped give birth to a modern age. Bicycles were manufactured there. Sewing machines. Tools. Cars. People moved from near and far to live in Perfect Sixes that were built within walking distance of factories where jobs were plentiful. The city laid trolley tracks and then added more and more tracks to accommodate the boom.

Colonel Albert Pope.

Hartford’s Population, 1850–1900

YEAR	POPULATION OF HARTFORD
1850	13,555
1860	29,152
1870	37,743
1880	42,551
1890	53,230
1900	79,850

Starting with a colonial grist mill, like begat like.

The man accompanying that bike on the train, Albert Pope, was a restless Civil War veteran and an industrialist who was as skilled at promoting innovation as he was at manufacturing it. He was bringing his baby to Hartford because that’s where the innovators of the day were changing manufacturing forever.

When Pope’s train stopped in Hartford, he hopped onto his fifty-six-inch Duplex Excelsior, a relatively unsafe mechanism with a large front wheel, a small back one, and a penchant for pitching riders over the handlebars. Pope asked for directions and then headed off for the Weed Sewing Machine Company a mile away.⁵ What better way to convince a manufacturer to take on a new product, Pope thought, than to demonstrate that product in person?

A bike was an unusual sight in Hartford streets, and on his ride Pope attracted the attention of laughing, wide-eyed children, who fell in behind him. By the time he arrived at the brick factory on Capitol Avenue, he was followed by scores of children—and a few energetic adults eager for excitement.

Pope was pedaling to see George A. Fairfield, a talented machinist who met him at the Weed factory door and rather quickly caught Pope’s enthusiasm for the bike’s potential. Fairfield’s employees had been churning out sewing machines. With a few modifications, Fairfield believed they could use similar methods for drop-forging bicycle hubs and steering wheels.⁶

This was one of many partnerships that turned the Connecticut River Valley, writes Bruce D. Epperson in Peddling Bicycles to America: The Rise of an Industry, into the nineteenth century’s version of Silicon Valley. The best and brightest minds were drawn to opportunities for cash and creativity in the lower Connecticut Valley—most specifically Hartford, and in particular, Frog Hollow.⁷

1898 Pope Columbia “Standard of the World” ad.

If Frog Hollow was Silicon Valley, then George Fairfield was Steve Wozniak. Fairfield wasn’t as concerned with the finished product as he was with the production process. To Fairfield, every article produced in Frog Hollow was a manufacturing puzzle to be solved, and the factories that lined Capitol Avenue created a complex and robust economy with ample opportunity for problem-solving. In addition to Sharps rifles, Frog Hollow factories turned out Weed sewing machines and, eventually, Pope’s bicycles and electric- and gas-powered automobiles, as well as a wide array of tools.

With the help of Christopher M. Spencer, an inventor, the Weed company (and later the Hartford Machine Screw Co.) set the standard for efficiency and innovation. For a while, Weed’s factory was larger than the better-known Colt’s Armory.⁸ For a few years, announcements about the latest technology ran in the Courant nearly daily in a regular column, “Manufacturing Notes.” On just one day in 1878, the column announced that Weed was developing a “twin needle” sewing machine for use in shoe and harness work. Down the street, the workers at Billings & Spencer were perfecting a device that could be used for clipping horses—or shearing sheep. The device allowed the clipper to finish clipping a horse in an hour or less.⁹ How long it took to clip a horse without benefit of Billings & Spencer’s new device is lost history, but if the breathless Courant column is any indication, an hour was a big deal.

For Pope, the bicycle was only his latest obsession. While visiting the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exposition, Pope saw a two-wheeled velocipede with an enormous front wheel and a smaller, solid rubber tire in the back. The contraption had been around for centuries, but the 1870s public disdained it. Horses were frightened by it, and municipal ordinances banned it from parks and avenues.

“Pope Manufacturing Co.” Haines Photo Co. Copyright Claimant. Pope Mfg. Co. #2, Hartford, Conn. c. 1909. Retrieved from Library of Congress, www.loc.gov/item/2007662033

None of that deterred Pope. He was ready for a new venture, and within a year of witnessing the velocipede, he had sunk $3,000 (about $125,000 in today’s money) into the manufacturing of bicycles.¹⁰

Fairfield was sold on Pope’s contraption, but Weed’s board of directors did not share his excitement. Fortunately, Fairfield saw the big picture—and the future. For generations, work in Frog Hollow had consisted of labor-intensive efforts performed with the help of draft animals. Yet water that turned millstones became steam power, steam became combustion engines, and engines became electricity. New employees were trading rakes and shovels for machines that would deliver the country into a new industrial age.¹¹ With industrialization, work shifted to capital and animals were retired in favor of machines, which seemed bound by no limits.¹² Obsolete draft animals were replaced by horses, which would soon be replaced by mechanisms powered by steam. Fairfield knew that if Weed could capture even a piece of the coming market, the company’s shareholders would walk away wealthy. That was part of his argument to his board, and the directors rather reluctantly voted to accept an order to manufacture fifty bicycles as prototypes.

At first it seemed the directors’ reticence was the proper response. Weed workers encountered one difficulty after another learning to forge the bicycle frame, shape the wheel rims, and fabricate steel handlebars and cranks. Fairfield was adamant, though, that this would be Weed’s next success, and after much trial and error the workers turned out a bicycle that weighed sixty pounds. It was christened the Columbia, the first commercial self-propelled vehicle in America. (“Columbia” became a generic name for the bicycle, as “Kodak” later was for the camera.)

In Frog Hollow machinists anxious to try out the latest theories of production teamed with businessmen such as Pope to take advantage of Hartford’s astonishing machine tool companies, which would include Pratt & Whitney Machine Tool (that later became the behemoth aircraft manufacturer) and Billings & Spencer.

Pope was a restless man who had moved from manufacturing shoes to building wildly popular cigarette-rolling machines that fit into a coat pocket and eliminated finger stains. Pope also briefly manufactured an air pistol that sold for three dollars and was, according to an 1876 Forest and Stream advertisement, “recommended by Gen. W. T. Sherman,” the controversial military strategist known for his “total war” approach to the enemy.

By the mid-1850s, Frog Hollow’s colonial families with names such as Babcock, Russ, and Hungerford had sold their farms. Every few weeks, more excavation chewed up Frog Hollow farmland. At one point a new building planned near the Weed Sewing Machine plant was delayed because there simply weren’t enough bricks.¹³ Over time, trolley tracks were laid down newly drawn streets. The neighborhood was a hive of activity. Despite the poverty of some of its residents—many of them immigrants—the town was about to boast the highest per capita income in the United States.¹⁴

The impact of this shift cannot be overstated. While machinists harnessed new technology, the middle class “emerged as a moral and political power.”¹⁵ Manufacturers and industrialists already engaged in innovation in Vermont and Massachusetts looked south and saw Frog Hollow’s farmland, fed by abundant water power along with the city’s recently laid tracks; they moved swiftly to buy land, build factories, and hire workers. The boom time started with the 1850s opening of the Sharps Rifle factory in the area where once a gristmill had stood.¹⁶

In 1820 William H. Imlay, a shopkeeper, bought a flaxseed oil mill at the western end of what is now Hartford’s Capitol Avenue but was then a dirt road known as Oil Mill Lane. The area around the mill became known as Imlay’s Upper Mills.¹⁷ Mills were so important that early American towns were often laid out around them. During King Philip’s War in the 1670s, the mill in Springfield, Mass., was destroyed and some residents left for towns that still had working mills.¹⁸ Without a mill, settlers spent hours with a pestle and mortar—an average of two hours a day, in fact—just to prepare corn for a family’s daily bread.

Mill owners were so prized that they were sometimes given free land for their business.¹⁹ Because their mills were so important, mill owners were generally considered town leaders. Imlay was a part of a group of Hartford residents whose members in 1827 were appointed to study the feasibility of erecting a fireproof building where town records could be stored. Up to then, the town clerk—usually a man who held the office for life—kept the records in his home or office.²⁰

Like the machinists and toolmakers after him, Imlay was industrious to the extreme. One day, evidently without a thought to the history of the place, Imlay removed the last bit of an old riverside Dutch fort in Hartford, the site where Europeans first made a mark on the land.²¹ Imlay wanted to dam a marsh, perhaps to increase his water power.

The Sharps Rifle factory opened near the mill, where water could run the early machinery. The name of the street now known as Capitol Avenue frequently changed to reflect local industries. Oil Mill Lane was later known as Rifle Lane.²² For a time, when Trinity College anchored one end, the street was known as College. It was also known—at least a portion of it—as Stowe Street, for the famous author Harriet Beecher Stowe, who lived in a more affluent part of town known as Nook Farm, just north of Frog Hollow.²³

Sharps came to the hollow at the request of George H. Penfield, who owned land in the neighborhood and was a Sharps shareholder. Penfield believed in the abundant resources of Frog Hollow, and for a while, a street in the neighborhood was named after him, though it was eventually changed to Putnam.²⁴

Patented in 1848, Christian Sharps’s breech-loading rifle quickly replaced the cumbersome muzzleloader.²⁵ For Frog Hollow, the Sharps factory was a goose laying one golden egg after another. During the Civil War, the Sharps rifle was popular with both U.S. and Confederate troops.²⁶ The Sharps company was paid a royalty of one dollar per rifle, or nearly thirty in today’s dollars. Henry Ward Beecher, who was the younger brother of Harriet, said that one Sharps—later known as “Old Reliable”—carried more moral weight than one hundred Bibles, a statement that confounded some of the members of his Brooklyn, N.Y., church. Newspapers carried stories that rifles were shipped in boxes labeled “books” and “Bibles” to aid people in Kansas who opposed slavery. The press had a field day with “Beecher’s Bibles.”²⁷ Throughout the war, the Daily Courant carried notices that the factory was hiring.²⁸ Unemployment was minimal.

Sharps was the first factory of any significant size in Frog Hollow, but it was quickly followed by others. Jobs brought people like Charles Billings, a machinist of old New England stock. One of Billings’s ancestors, Richard, had been granted six acres in Hartford in 1640, but later the family moved north to Vermont. At age seventeen Billings began an apprenticeship with Robbins & Lawrence Co., gun makers and machinists in Windsor, Vermont. As was common at the time, Billings’s family agreed to provide board, lodging, and clothing in exchange for his instruction and a salary of fifty, then fifty-five, then sixty cents for the first, second, and third year of labor. Billings served his indenture then moved to Hartford to work at Colt’s Patent Fire Arms Manufacturing Co., which was then considered the premier gun maker on the East Coast.

Colt’s, which was located east of the neighborhood near the Connecticut River, was also an early laboratory for many early industrial innovators. There on the oil-soaked floors, Billings worked as a die-sinker in the drop-forging department, where the machinery was complicated and expensive to maintain. Drop forge is a process used to shape metal into complex shapes by dropping a heavy hammer with a die on its face onto a piece of metal. The process involved “a rough-forming stroke in a drop forge, a pressing operation to trim off the unwanted ‘flash,’ and a finishing stroke in another drop forge.”²⁹

Weed Sewing Machine plant, c. 1889, Hartford, Connecticut.

In 1862 Billings moved to E. Remington & Sons in Utica, N.Y., where he began streamlining the drop-forging process and increased the company’s efficiency by “40-fold,” according to the 1901 Commemorative Biographical Record of Hartford County, Conn.³⁰ After saving Remington some fifty thousand dollars, he returned to Hartford in 1865 to work at Weed Sewing Machine Co., where he revolutionized drop-forging in the manufacture of the sewing machine’s shuttles, the part of the machine beneath the needle that creates a lockstitch.

The reputation of Weed’s machines quickly reached almost mythical proportions. “If you desire a real ‘peace commissioner’ in the parlor,” said one New York Times article, “or a gold mine ‘constantly on hand,’ or a mint ready for ‘home use’ which will only require the touch of gentle hands to produce a currency the range of which is universal,” then you were urged to buy a Weed sewing machine.³¹

Originally, Weed machines were made by contractors spread around the state. In the summer of 1865, sensing there was efficiency to be had in consolidation, the owners of Pratt & Whitney began building their new machine shops along Flower Street, using H. & S. Bissell as contractor. The main building was four stories high and 150 feet long, and Weed was one of the early tenants.³²

The next year, 1866, Weed took over the space formerly filled by Sharps, which was eventually purchased by showman P. T. Barnum, who moved that operation to Bridgeport. Weed officials eventually bought the entire factory, and many Sharps employees stayed on to make sewing machines.³³ In the manufacturing process there was not much difference between guns and sewing machines.³⁴

The sewing machines sold for a princely sixty to two hundred dollars, depending on the cabinetry. Some of the fancier cases were made of black walnut and were decorated with inlaid pearl. The popularity of the machines is hard to square with the economics of the time. The Civil War was followed by a six-and-a-half-year financial crisis in the United States, and household income hovered around ten dollars a week. A sewing machine was a substantial investment, but consumers ordered the machines anyway and sometimes waited months for delivery.³⁵

That same year, Weed bought the most ornate horse carriage imaginable (from George S. Evarts on Albany Ave.) for advertising and delivery purposes. The carriage alone—never mind the machines it carried—merited a three-inch write-up in the Courant.³⁶

Owner T. E. Weed had moved operations to Hartford, but it was Billings who brought the machine to the level where it rivaled the better-known Singer machine. A Chicago Republican writer, in the flowery language of the day, wrote that the Hartford factory “provided with the most ingenious mechanical devices of modern invention for perfecting every part of the machine.”³⁷ No other machine, raved one New York Times article, had grown so rapidly in popularity: “It would seem that this machine will soon have, and deservedly so, a world-wide reputation.”³⁸

At their Frog Hollow factory, workers turned out two hundred machines a day—a short five years after receiving a patent.³⁹ Industrial historians have given far more attention to the manufacturing of cars in American production, but sewing machines gave birth to the principles of interchangeability, which could be applied to clocks and guns and automobiles and munitions—just about anything that could be made in a factory.

Where the sewing machine actually started is unclear. Elias Howe Jr., who was born in Massachusetts, patented what’s considered the world’s first sewing machine in 1846, though there were machines that accomplished the same task before his. Howe gave credit to his wife, Elizabeth J. Ames Howe, who, he told others, created in two hours what he had struggled to finish for fourteen years. Whatever his wife’s contribution, Howe applied for a patent in his own name, according to Russell Conwell, a minister and orator who served with Howe in the Civil War. In a speech Conwell would give more than five thousand times, called “Acres of Diamonds,” he said Howe’s “wife made up her mind one day they would starve to death if there wasn’t something or other invented pretty soon, and so in two hours she invented the sewing-machine. Of course he took out the patent in his name. Men always do that.”⁴⁰ Prior to Elizabeth Howe’s breakthrough, Howe earned nine dollars a week as a machinist, and Elizabeth, with their three children, sometimes took in sewing to help with family finances.

As with most new technology, early adopters anxious to protect their investments hired good lawyers, and sometimes history remembers the ones who were successful not so much in the lab but in court. (Edison brought skills to the public sphere both as an inventor and as a scrappy battler in court.) Howe spent five years in court suing Isaac Singer for patent infringement in what the newspapers of the day called the Sewing Machine Wars. Howe eventually won.⁴¹

There was at the time no equal to the rapid adoption of the sewing machine by the American public. Between Howe’s 1854 court victory and 1870, some 1.5 million machines were built.⁴² Of those, 70,000 came from the Weed company in Hartford. In 1869 Weed produced 20,000 machines, and nearly 30,000 the year after that.⁴³ The Weed Sewing Machine Co. completed its one hundred thousandth machine in September 1871. The machine’s relative high cost did not stop its fans. One account of a Weed tour in the Courant called the machines “a kind of iron poetry.” The brief was signed “Old Curiosity.”⁴⁴

The factory proper was one of the largest in the city, and the machine was a marvel in “take-up,” or the process by which the needle looped around the thread beneath the fabric being sewed. For that, consumers could thank the man Pope was so anxious to hire, George A. Fairfield, designer and patent holder of the two-lever system that allowed this smooth dance between needle and thread:

As the needle bar passes down and the point of the needle enters the goods, this “take up” remains stationary until the needle has penetrated to the eye, when it passes down rapidly until the needle has reached its lowest descent, throwing out the slack to form a loop for the shuttle to pass through, and is again stationary until the shuttle passes the loop and the needle bar commences to rise, when it ascends rapidly until the loop is taken up, when it is again stationary while the needle bar goes up to tighten the stitch, the “take up” in the meantime holding the thread firmly until the feed has given the desired length of stitch.⁴⁵

Genius.

The machine won honors at fairs in Pennsylvania, Chicago, and New Hampshire, as well as the behemoth Windham County Fair in Brooklyn, Conn. The machine also won international acclaim, including three awards in 1873 and a “best family sewing machine” award at an exposition in Paris.⁴⁶ This was exciting news back home, considering the company had sent two of its three models strictly for exhibition, and not for competition. “There is no boast, therefore, in claiming this award … places the Company’s beyond the reach of rivalry,” said a subsequent advertisement’s humble-brag.⁴⁷ One testimonial from circa 1874 listed the ways in which the Weed machine was superior, including, from a female customer, “Because it never vexes me.”⁴⁸

With Weed and others, Frog Hollow’s factory district grew, and by 1880 the neighborhood’s streets were laid out and the manufacturing heart of the city was beating fast. The increasingly crowded neighborhood drew tradesmen like Charles Thurston, a machinist who lived with his family at 18 Putnam Street. Thurston was one of nine hundred men who lost their tools in a suspicious fire at Colt’s in 1864. The fire was detected around 8 a.m. in the morning of February 4. The Portland brownstone walls and slate roof—thought to be fireproof at the time—were destroyed. The factory’s yellow pine floors had been soaked for nearly a decade with machinery oil, and when ignited they went up like a match—“faster than a man could run,” according to one eyewitness. Neighbors gathered and watched from nearby buildings as the ornate Byzantine dome fell within an hour of the fire’s detection.⁴⁹ The Courant speculated that the blaze, which destroyed the older part of the factory, home to the most expensive machinery, was the work of an arsonist, though the miscreant was never found.⁵⁰ Though he had to replace his tools, the booming economy delivered Thurston work fairly quickly and in his own neighborhood.

While Thurston was losing his tools, his neighbor, Peter Kenney, was trying to extinguish the flames. Kenney, also a Frog Hollow resident, Irish immigrant, and Colt’s employee, had been a volunteer firefighter for three years before the fire. He and others tried to save the factory, but the water supply was inadequate. The fire was especially damaging because it was during the height of the factory’s Civil War production. From the New York Times: “Those who had friends employed at the armory were foremost in the rush, and wives, mothers, and sisters, with anxious looks, made eager haste to the meadows. We have never witnessed so much excitement on a similar occasion. Seventeen or eighteen hundred workmen aroused by the sudden cry of fire in their midst could not well maintain among them all, perfect composure; and thus it was that in some instances the widest excitement ensued.”

The fire was considered the worst calamity to hit Hartford up to that time, and there was concern that Colt’s would not recover; but the company did recover and the fire hastened the formation of a paid town fire department. For Kenney, the firefighter, the Colt’s disaster was the start of a big year. He continued to fight fires from the No. 6 firehouse downtown. On Christmas evening that year, he married his childhood sweetheart from Ireland, downtown at St. Patrick’s Church. They celebrated their fiftieth wedding anniversary there in 1914.

The fire also gave rise to the insurance industry, which would carry Hartford’s economy for generations. After the Colt’s fire, Elizabeth Colt, widow of company founder Samuel, decided to rebuild, and the new five-story factory opened just three years later.⁵¹ The following year, Mark Twain toured the facilities and became an immediate fan. He wrote:

On every floor is a dense wilderness of strange iron machines … a tangled forest of rods, bars, pulleys, wheels, and all the imaginable and unimaginable forms of mechanism. There are machines to cut all the various parts of a pistol, roughly, from the original steel: machines to trim them down and polish them: machines to brand and number them: machines to bore the barrels out: machines to rifle them: machines that shave them down neatly to a proper size, as deftly as one would shave a candle in a lathe.⁵²

Twain was so impressed with Hartford and its industry (and the presence of his American publisher there) that he moved his family to the city in 1874, and nearly spent his way into the poorhouse building a sprawling brick mansion in the Nook Farm neighborhood. There he would write some of his best-known work, including The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

“I think this is the best built and handsomest town I have ever seen,” he wrote.⁵³ Albert Pope thought so, too. But for every boom there is a bust. In a four-year period that ended in 1876, Weed production dropped by half. Given the businesses that had already left the city or had much reduced their production, people were nervous. Pope bought the Weed company so he could have his own factory. The Courant sought to reassure a nervous city, and called Pope’s purchase “one of the most important business transactions that has taken place in Hartford for a long time, but it contains no implication whatever of any removal from here. The only change is one of ownership.”⁵⁴ The manufacturing of sewing machines continued alongside that of bicycles for another ten years, until Pope phased out sewing machines to focus exclusively on bikes and, eventually, automobiles.

With Hartford as a magnet for laborers looking for good jobs, the Courant reported that farms around the state were being abandoned in droves. Members gathered for a Dairymen’s meeting in Hartford in 1892 and decided to compile a list of abandoned farms, and old mills. “The time is remembered by many when almost every waterfall on the thousands of streams which drain the hills and water the valleys of New England turned a wheel,” said one report.⁵⁵ By 1910 all new industrial development in Frog Hollow was basically complete. In a heady fifty-some years, the city had gone from farmland to industrial giant.

In 1912 the Courant carried a story that extolled the city’s embrace of manufacturing with the headline, “When It’s Made in Hartford, It’s Made Right”:

But one reason—aside from that of civic pride and the activity of her citizens—can be ascribed to the advance Hartford has made, and that reason is the manner in which the city has kept up with the times. Old manufacturing methods have given way to the most modern kind in this city just as soon as new methods were invented; in many cases they found their birthplace in this city. For instance, when the field for manufacturing bicycles proved better than the field for sewing-machines, a local company manufacturing sewing machines immediately took up the work of making bicycles.⁵⁶

Because the various manufacturers weren’t competing with one another, newcomers were able to rely on already-established businesses for a leg up. Settled into its new four-story-high factory on Capitol Avenue, Hartford Machine (now Stanadyne, based in Windsor, Conn.) began to develop what became an automatic high-speed lathe. The new company originally began in a spare room in the Weed factory.⁵⁷ The Frog Hollow incubator system continued, and companies were able to rely on each other for improvement in their disparate products.

Pope manufacturers knew the early design of the bicycle was faulty. The frame was sturdy but unless riders rode with their weight thrown toward the back, they would be pitched over the front wheel. Brave early consumers were forced to figure that out for themselves. Twain himself elected to take lessons, after which he wrote an unpublished manuscript titled “Taming the Bicycle.” A boater all his life (his pen name, after all, came from riverboats), he insisted on calling the handlebar a tiller and ended the essay with, “Get a bicycle. You will not regret it, if you live.”⁵⁸

Other manufacturing companies such as Ford and Singer built stores to sell their products. Pope did not. If a consumer wanted to purchase a bike, the buyer had to go to a hardware store or visit an agent who sold Columbias.⁵⁹ That quirk did not seem to keep customers away, and Pope knew it wouldn’t. A Columbia was a specialty item, and so was its owner. Pope was appealing to the modern man—most riders were male—who was willing to stand out in a crowd and spend no small amount of energy tracking down his product. Other manufacturing luminaries, including Henry Ford, came to visit the Hartford plant for inspiration. Before Ford became famous for it, Pope’s employees used interchangeable bicycle wheels, tires, and gear-shaft drive mechanisms, a technique they learned from Fairfield and one borrowed by Ford with great success.

Early bicycles were mostly ridden by men. Female cyclists had to first be convinced to wear bloomers (or “rational dress”) to allow for peddling. 1895. Courtesy of Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, D.C. 20540.

By 1896 the plant had a thousand machines turning out screws at tens of thousands per minute, according to a 1918 American Machinist magazine article. The machines included “milling machines, turret lathes, screw machines, grinding machines, drilling and boring machines.”⁶⁰ Within ten years, Pope stood before a crowd in Philadelphia and said that American-made bicycles had taken over the world market—in part because the Hartford factory included an entire division devoted to modifying the product to suit the riders of a particular country’s needs.⁶¹ Pope’s Hartford operations grew to include five factories that employed four thousand people.⁶² Meanwhile, in an 1896 interview with the London-based publication Cycling World, Pope said there was no limit to the bicycle market. At $125 the bicycle was pricey for the average consumer, yet sales quickly hit one thousand a year. George Keller, who designed Pope’s factory housing, told his wife that Pope couldn’t even sell him a bicycle because the factory had orders they couldn’t begin to fulfill. (Keller also designed Bushnell Park’s “Soldiers and Sailors Memorial Arch,” of Portland brownstone.⁶³ His ashes are buried in the arch along with the ashes of his wife, Mary.)

Early (and bizarre) Columbia bicycle ad.

While the bicycle design was vamped and revamped, the Hartford plant was among the first in the country to switch from coal to kerosene fuel.⁶⁴ Ever the competitor, Pope began buying patents as quickly as he could. Ford did the same thing. Pope also employed a knack for self-promotion unrivaled by any of his contemporaries, save perhaps Barnum. In this, Ford could not compete. Pope once told an interviewer that his perfect employee was the most faithful fellow in the world. “He has been in my employ for 17 years, yet he has never even asked for a holiday. He works both day and night, is never asleep or intoxicated, and though I pay him more than $250,000 a year, I consider that he costs me nothing. His name is Advertisement.”⁶⁵

Pope mostly treated his (human) employees as would a benevolent dictator. He was generous at Christmas, and before there was such a thing as workers’ insurance, he was quick to send money to the families of ill employees. An 1893 magazine article praised Pope for his factory’s washrooms, which included hot and cold water sinks, as well as a library and reading room and a stable for workers to store their bicycles, since most of them rode to work.⁶⁶

That benevolence shifted a bit when workers threatened to join a machinists’ union in 1901. The factory shut down briefly but opened again when negotiators agreed to let workers form committees, though not a union.⁶⁷ Pope also agreed to a nine-hour day and a raise in pay.

Many of Frog Hollow’s industrialists had served their apprenticeships beneath the blue dome of Colt’s in the southeastern part of the city, but not Pope. Yet both Pope and Colt understood that their fortunes depended on their workers’ happiness. Pope purchased land that had been the old Bartholomew family farm to the southwest of his factory, and donated ninety acres for the creation of a park. Designed by the famous Olmsted brothers, the park included tennis courts and a rolling lawn. Pope said, “I believe that a large part of the success of any manufacturing enterprise depends on the health, happiness and orderly life of its employees.”⁶⁸

To hawk his bikes, Pope sponsored races and a bicycle-riding school and promoted public parks as tremendous places to test a bike. He countered certain clergy members’ assertions that bike riding on Sunday was wrong with the suggestion that churches build bike barns similar to the ones outside his factory, so worshippers could ride to church. And wasn’t exercise a form of worshipping God?

He also founded the League of American Wheelmen, pushed for better roads through a magazine devoted to the joys of cycling, and endowed positions in highway engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to make the roads smoother.⁶⁹ Without good roads, Pope knew, bicycles were little more than expensive paperweights.

But as with the Weed bust of a few years earlier, the bicycle boom was relatively short-lived. By the turn of the last century, consumers began to crave transportation that did not require pedaling. Pope’s company was slightly slow to catch on, and for a few months they suffered from overproduction amid falling demand. But then Pope started a Motor Carriage Department. And there Pope applied the same energy to the creation of his version of the horseless carriage. The first product was an electric car, the “Mark III,” in 1897. Using technology honed in the manufacture of bicycles, the Pope plant “was truly the nursery of the infant [automobile] industry,” according to one observer.⁷⁰ Just as they had figured out how to keep bicycle riders from pitching over the handlebars, Pope engineers began to finesse electric motors.

In short order, American consumers could choose from the Pope-Tribune, the Pope-Waverly, the Pope-Toledo, and the Pope-Hartford, a midpriced auto that went for $3,200 and was priced squarely between Ford models that sold for $1,000–$2,000 and the higher-priced Packard at $7,000.⁷¹ By 1899 Pope had all but single-handedly turned Hartford into the center of the automotive world.⁷²

Two of Pope’s employees, George H. Day and Hiram Percy Maxim, set out to create workable engines, but Day’s heart was not in gasoline-powered contraptions. In fact, by one account, when faced with an engine, he shook his head and asked if the engines had to have so many gears and so much oil. “We are on the wrong track,” Day was supposed to have said. “No one will buy a carriage that has to have all that greasy machinery in it. It might be that young fellows like you … would buy a few of them as interesting toys, but that would be only a drop in the bucket.”⁷³

Pope wholeheartedly agreed, “because you can’t get people to sit over an explosion.”⁷⁴ (Sigh.)

While Pope’s employees focused on perfecting a two-seated electric car—also called the Columbia—Midwest manufacturers, Henry Ford among them, were aiming for the middle market with mass-produced (and cheaper) manufacturing. In 1899 Pope’s company produced more than half of the cars in the United States.⁷⁵ The Courant predicted in 1905 that the Columbia car was showing massive improvement, due in part to the addition of nickel-steel parts. The company would continue its production of electric delivery wagons and trucks and was entertaining large advance orders.⁷⁶

But along with Thomas Edison, Ford was as talented as an industrialist as he was skilled at lawyering up. Pope and Ford rather quickly went to court, and eventually Pope’s legal issues with Ford took too much time and energy. That, along with his reluctance to pursue a workable gas engine, relegated Albert Pope to the edges of history. People in Hartford know him. People in Frog Hollow certainly know him. But the world at large knows Henry Ford and his vision of assembly line manufacturing—something he borrowed from his Hartford competitor. History is not always fair.

In other Frog Hollow factories a combination of bad luck and bad planning made the machines go dark, which eventually left the neighborhood without a manufacturing base. In June 1875 the Courant carried a story about rumors that Sharps Rifle would move to Bridgeport. It was evident, said the story, that the gun was “the best breech-loading arm manufactured in the world,” and the article called for Hartford capitalists to fight to keep Sharps, as “we have not so many manufactories here that we can afford to spare any of them.”⁷⁷

In 1886 the Weed company announced at its annual stockholder meeting that the capital stock of the company had shrunk from $600,000 to $240,000.⁷⁸ From a high of seventy-five dollars a share, Weed shares had slipped to five dollars.

In July 1914 Billings & Spencer paid $250,000 for the old Columbia motorcar plant on Laurel Street. Columbia’s time had passed, while Billings & Spencer had just added two hundred workers to their workforce of six hundred. The company intended to expand its production of wrenches and small tools. The purchase included 8¼ acres of land, roughly 2¼ of which were buildings. The company made twenty-three different kinds of wrenches and with its drop-forge work had a direct line to Detroit and its car factories. The factory was near the railroad, and rents in the neighborhood were “reasonable,” according to the Courant.⁷⁹

Despite the relative economic success of the neighborhood, Frog Hollow’s business fronts didn’t have the shiny windows and fancy entrances of downtown Hartford. For all the development of the previous fifty years, at the turn of the last century the place had the feel of a throwback to early Hartford. It was almost as if buildings had been put up so quickly to accommodate the influx that no one had thought of aesthetics. Not to fear. A writer in the Courant suggested that the prosperity of the neighborhood would eventually force establishments to catch up to the rest of the modern city.⁸⁰ The market, and consumers, would demand it.

And then the United States entered World War I, and as had happened during the Civil War, Hartford’s workforce worked overtime. Between 1917 and 1918, the bulk of the state’s industry was involved in defense contracting, with Hartford at the center of the effort.⁸¹ In Frog Hollow and elsewhere, the factories that had remained essentially never closed during wartime, and the need for workers was unending.

Billings & Spencer plant, Laurel Street. Publisher, Chapin News Company, Hartford. Richard L. Mahoney Collection, Hartford History Center, Hartford Public Library

Defense jobs opened the doors to a new group of workers looking for better wages. In 1916 there were 25,063 factory workers in Hartford and about 20 percent of them were women.⁸² Women were considered neater than their male colleagues at Pratt, where many of them worked making drawings of the various weapons, such as Russian rifles and British guns.⁸³

A 1919 Courant headline called the increased productivity “War’s Miracles in City’s Factories.” The factory’s armies, said the article by David D. Bidwell, swelled by fourteen thousand hands. The output of taxable goods increased by 250 percent, and at the time of the armistice in 1918, Hartford’s payroll topped out at one million dollars a week, a record high.

“They drew to their home city, as a magnet draws steel filings, workmen and women from all over southern New England and in fact from many towns hundreds of miles distant,” the Courant said. “They made their city known as one of the liveliest of live centers on the munitions map.”⁸⁴ The city’s cost of living increased 54 percent, but wages had grown by 80 percent. The factories began to expand their walls and hours, and more employers reverted to the Albert Pope/Samuel Colt way of doing things by offering after-work activities and events. Popular baseball teams grew into an obsession with factory leagues competing through the week.

If the war brought work for the factories, residents of Frog Hollow found themselves cutting back. A coal shortage, and an attendant rise in prices, meant that fuel was too expensive for most families. Frog Hollow residents had long been accustomed to cold furnaces, at least until November 1, the traditional date for beginning to heat homes for the winter, but in 1917 a mid-October snow tested that resolve, as “New England weather is very indifferent to the alleged shortage of fuel,” according to a Courant article.⁸⁵ The shortage was reported at fifty million tons, and first priority was given to the defense industry. Though there were some instances of gouging and hoarding coal, most residents heeded a November 1917 Courant headline, “Every Coal User Must Co-operate.”⁸⁶

After World War I, Hartford wasn’t precisely a sleepy town, but it had the feel of most other midsized New England cities. Downtowns were robust, though after the stores closed, all but the streetlights went dark. The latter part of the era was spent in the Depression, and though New England struggled, the northern economy remained healthier than in other parts of the country. Smaller farmers in New England, in particular, did not suffer on the same scale as their mid-western colleagues.⁸⁷ The Park (Hog) River flooded frequently, and city planners decided that miles of sandbags were not enough. In 1940 the Army Corps of Engineers began burying the river, which had come to serve as an aboveground conduit for industrial waste.The project included nine miles of pipe, and Frog Hollow shuddered in preparation for another shift in fortunes.

After every war since the civil one, defense plants had moved to peacetime products, only to rev up again with munitions for the next war. During World War II, once again the city shifted back. This was not necessarily as seamless as adjusting a wrench or recalibrating a machine. In factories, shifting production of items between war- and peacetime could take a month or a year.⁸⁸ But when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, Hartford was just two turns of a screw from being a war machine. Already the capital city had in place an infrastructure that would contribute greatly to the war effort, in both human and material capital. Already Connecticut was an industry center for aircraft manufacturing, employing 13.5 percent of the workers nationally in the field.⁸⁹

In fact, even before the country declared war, Hartford was operating as if the country was at war already. In September 1941—three months before the attack at Pearl Harbor—the city boasted fifty-two defense-related industries.⁹⁰ On the day that will live in infamy, the New York Times reported that Hartford was “having growing pains. Defense work is the reason. Factories once used to turn out things like typewriters, percolators and toasters are now manufacturing war materials. Defense workers have flooded into the Nutmeg State’s sedate old capital on the muddy Connecticut River.”⁹¹ By the time the war ended, Connecticut manufacturers had fulfilled more than eight billion dollars in contracts.⁹²

But with peacetime the suburbs were calling, and those Frog Hollow residents who could do so began to move away from the center of the city. Ironically, the budding insurance industry would step in and make Hartford, for a while, the Insurance Capital of the World.

The idea of insuring one’s self or property started in Philadelphia as an antidote to fires that periodically swept through the closely built wood structures of that town. Word spread in Hartford that James G. Batterson, the son of a stonecutter and owner of a granite works, was preparing to offer insurance to travelers on railroads, a notoriously dangerous form of passage. One day in 1864, when Batterson ran into James Bolter, a banker, at the Hartford post office, Bolter jokingly asked him how much it would cost to insure him on his walk home to Asylum Hill (a distance of about four blocks). Batterson said, perhaps facetiously, “Two cents,” which Bolter paid, and thus was born the nation’s first accident policy. (Bolter was supposed to have made it home safely.)⁹³

Insurance would change the face of industry as well. Frank W. Cheney of the Cheney Brothers silk manufacturing company bought the first major accident policy in May 1864.⁹⁴ A 1909 book extolled the work of the hypothetical “Mr. Engineer” and said that “wood-working machines, with the saws and knives revolving thousands of times a minute, seek in vain to mangle the hands and fingers of the workman, while cunningly devised guards permit the workman’s hands to push the work along or to glide harmlessly over knives or cutters; at the same time, there being no interference with the speed or limitation of the output.” All hail “safety elevators, emergency brakes, rail joints, automatic gate crossings and signals, life buoys and collapsible lifeboats, safety hatches, life guns, safety clothes lines; and methods for safeguarding the milk and food supply.”⁹⁵ For a while the offices of Travelers Insurance included what they called a “Chamber of Industrial Horrors” for visitors to study photographs of explosions, open elevator shafts, and machinery before protective devices had been installed. Defective chains, broken cogs, snapped tubes and rivets—it was all on display.⁹⁶

For all the exhibit’s trumpeting of a safer work environment, workers were still routinely injured and sent home to Frog Hollow to exist on the kindness of neighbors or local churches. By some estimates, industrial accidents occurred two million times a year, and that number was far and away higher than any other statistic in any part of the world, according to a 1911 Courant article.⁹⁷ In 1910 the Aetna Life Insurance Company published Safeguards for the Prevention of Industrial Accidents, because according to that book’s first chapter, “The toll of human life and limb being exacted by modern industry has reached such startling proportions as to be a serious menace to our national welfare.”⁹⁸

This was evident both in the number of deaths and dismemberments, and in the laws that were being passed to prevent such events. The machinery heated up, and in February 1912 E. Sidney Berry, counsel of the Hartford Steam Boiler Inspection & Insurance Company, spoke to a gathering of insurance agents: “This is a great country for liberty, but we lay more emphasis on liberty of property than we do on liberty of life.”⁹⁹ Owners had not taken proper steps because, according to Berry, accidents didn’t cost them enough. After all, when railroads found it expensive to pay recompense to injured passengers, they began to observe stricter safety measures.¹⁰⁰

Boiled down, prevention was the responsibility of the employee.¹⁰¹ If an injury occurred on the job, the company rarely if ever took steps to make things right. If one worker was injured to the point of incapacity, there was always someone else to step in. But that began to change as labor unions grew in Frog Hollow’s factories and legislators passed worker-friendly protections, since “the workingman is the one least able to bear the burden of liability.”¹⁰²

For decades Travelers owned the market on accident insurance, and by 1885 the company announced it had sold one million policies, an astonishingly high number, considering the fairly restrictive rules that dictated who could be covered. Only men between the ages of eighteen and seventy (who were considered employable) could be insured. Women were uninsurable, as were people without jobs, because their time was considered statistically worthless.¹⁰³ Policies were written to provide compensation in the event of the death of the policyholder, or the loss of two limbs, the loss of eyesight, or the loss of one limb and one eye, or any combination thereof.¹⁰⁴

The rules changed as more women entered the factories. By 1900 as many as 50 percent of all U.S. workers—male and female—were covered by some kind of policy that protected against financial ruin in the case of illness.¹⁰⁵ But this industry wasn’t based in Frog Hollow. Much of the insurance business was downtown or just to the north of the neighborhood, in graceful Asylum Hill. The insurance industry would carry Hartford through financially lean times, but by the 1960s all that remained of Frog Hollow’s manufacturing powerhouse was shells of factories surrounded by sturdy Perfect Six apartments. In those dwellings the doors shut tight, the walls were thick, and the stairwells held the smell of garlic, potatoes, and meat from two generations of families. If the factories were gone, the housing remained.