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
