American (white) women believed their duty was to bear as many children as possible—preferably sons, who could help with the family business, which was often farming. Only as the new country gave birth to itself, (white) women began to push for a kind of equal footing with their menfolk that included a say in family size.31 In early Hartford, this option was not available to most African American women, 90 percent of whom lived in slavery.32
The Babcocks are listed in the country’s first census in 1790 as free and white. They owned no slaves, though slavery was present in the state (more on that later). When Elisha Babcock died of pneumonia at age sixty-eight on April 7, 1821, he was buried in the Old South Cemetery of Hartford’s Second Congregational Church, now known as South Church. The Mercury continued publishing, though it is unclear who conducted the actual business. Some speculate the Babcock family—Dolly among them, until her death in 1832—kept the press rolling until the paper’s demise in 1833.
The family saltbox became home for an unmarried son and daughter, Col. James and Dolly, named for her mother. James Babcock was a sales agent for a man named Ira Todd, who sold among other goods French burr millstones, considered the best stones for milling flour and grain.33 Col. Babcock also served on a committee to raise money to aid people injured in a fire in Virginia. His business was frequently mentioned in Courant ads selling Sicily lemons and wax calf-skins of the highest quality, and asking for donations of long hair that would be used to stuff mattresses.34 (Hair mattresses were considered a step up from a stack of hemlock boughs.) When Miss Dolly Babcock, the daughter, joined her parents in death in 1871, the Courant erroneously trumpeted that she was, at age ninety, the oldest Hartford resident to die that year. In fact, that honor fell to Mrs. Tabitha Camp, who bested Dolly Babcock’s time on earth by a year and a half.35
An 1877 real estate notice offered—“for sale cheap”—“the property known as the Dolly Babcock homestead,” situated south of the home of a professor on a lot that was roughly two hundred by three hundred feet.36 The simple, high-pitched roofs of Hartford (the center-chimney Cape Cods and saltboxes still popular in New England) had given way to more ornate styles of architecture such as double-homes (or townhomes).37 To enable construction of the newly styled homes to go quickly, state legislators passed a law that shingles shipped from New York no longer required inspection.38
In 1890 the Babcock saltbox was nearly one hundred years old and deep into a slide into disrepair. Despite its historical significance there was not much discussion about preserving it. It was, simply, an old house in a neighborhood that was making way for newer, fancier homes, including a yellow mansion that had sat at the northeast corner of the Babcock plot since the 1820s. That mansion was home to several generations of Trinity (first called Washington College) presidents and faculty members.
In 1896, with little fanfare, the Babcock house was torn down to make room for a gracious new house for the widow of a state Republican Party scion.39 What had been the Babcock’s one-hundred-acre farm was carved up for yards, and the name of Babcock was consigned to the history books—and to a street in the Frog Hollow neighborhood.
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,
