River promotes industry

The Naugatuck River and the brooks that fed into it were responsible for the early growth of industry in the town. Hard to picture today, but the rock-strewn river and streams were once a hubbub of activity, providing jobs for hundreds of residents in factories that produced buttons and cutlery in the 1800s.

It’s true that the early settlers were attracted to the region for the abundance of grazing land. Their descendants, however, drifted toward the waterways to provide power for their small shops.

There were several major brooks in Naugatuck:
• Fulling Mill, which travels alongside the road leading to the town of Prospect;
• Hop Brook, north of the heights, swinging down into the river;
• Beacon Hill, located south of town at the edge of Bethany; and
• Long Meadow, at the west of the town.

The first recorded business use of the waterways was in the early 1700s when a carding — or fulling — mill was constructed. But for the most part, the use of the river and brooks went untapped for more than half a century.

By the early 1770s, the men who remained in Salem, later renamed Naugatuck, were less interested in farming and more attracted to the development of the water power of the streams and brooks leading to the river. Within two decades, Salem had four sawmills, a grist mill, Jude Hoadley’s cabinet shop for making spinning wheels and wooden wares, the Funn iron furnace on Long Meadow Brook, a small business for carding wool, a cooper shop and Jared Byington’s smithy and nail factory.

On Fulling Mill Brook, the purchasers of Byington’s shop constructed a flume half a mile long to supply their new button factory with power. In the early part of the nineteenth century, button-making flourished, to the point where there were six new button shops along the upper reaches of Fulling Mill by 1825.

In 1824, the Naugatuck River was dammed for the first time on record by Silas Grilley and Chauncey Lewis. They started button-making, but soon sold shop and power rights to Sylvester Clark, the clockmaker.

The river couldn’t be used for much else than its water power; finished goods and materials couldn’t be shipped by boat due to the river’s rocky nature and rapids. The Straitsville Turnpike Company, was organized in 1797 to run stages from New Haven to Litchfield by way of Straitsville.

— EILEEN K. EHMAN

Source: Special Edition of the Naugatuck Daily News (1844 - Naugatuck Sesquicentennial - 1944)

Water power peaks in 1850s

The 1850s marked the peak of activity on the brooks. In a shop on Beacon Hill Brook, sulphur match-making originated and cutlery became a popular business for a time. Smith and Hopkins, then well-established button makers, ventured into cutlery making and others followed suit.

But then, the number of shops began to decline; several were destroyed by fire and were never rebuilt. The insufficiency of the water power of the brook, which evidently declined as the years passed, put the shops at a disadvantage. The dam used by Smith and Hopkins broke after a fire in their factory in 1885.

In addition, machines were replacing hand work, calling for an increase in power consumption, and supplementing water power with steam required the carting of coal up the hills to the shops on the brooks. By 1885, the knife industry was nearly a thing of the past and, with it, the small shops by the brooks. Abandoned mill sites jutted out among the patches of woodland and blackberry bushes.

By 1900, only the Smith button factory remained in operation on the upper stretches of Fulling Mill Brook, while at its mouth, the Naugatuck Manufacturing Company was turning out copper floats where Homer Twitchell had once run his factory. On Beacon Hill Brook, one sawmill was open; on Hop Brook, nothing was left in operation. A few shops remained in Millville on Long Meadow Brook.

Business carried on in Naugatuck, away from the brooks and closer to railroad and highways. The days of taking power from the river and brooks were over.

— EILEEN K. EHMAN

Source: Special Edition of the Naugatuck Daily News (1844 - Naugatuck Sesquicentennial - 1944)