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
