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
