Frog Hollow. Susan Campbell
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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 in the abundant resources of Frog Hollow, and for a while, a street in the neighborhood was named after him, though it was eventually changed to Putnam.24
Patented in 1848, Christian Sharps’s breech-loading rifle quickly replaced the cumbersome muzzleloader.25 For Frog Hollow, the Sharps factory was a goose laying one golden egg after another. During the Civil War, the Sharps rifle was popular with both U.S. and Confederate troops.26 The Sharps company was paid a royalty of one dollar per rifle, or nearly thirty in today’s dollars. Henry Ward Beecher, who was the younger brother of Harriet, said that one Sharps—later known as “Old Reliable”—carried more moral weight than one hundred Bibles, a statement that confounded some of the members of his Brooklyn, N.Y., church. Newspapers carried stories that rifles were shipped in boxes labeled “books” and “Bibles” to aid people in Kansas who opposed slavery. The press had a field day with “Beecher’s Bibles.”27 Throughout the war, the Daily Courant carried notices that the factory was hiring.28 Unemployment was minimal.
Sharps was the first factory of any significant size in Frog Hollow, but it was quickly followed by others. Jobs brought people like Charles Billings, a machinist of old New England stock. One of Billings’s ancestors, Richard, had been granted six acres in Hartford in 1640, but later the family moved north to Vermont. At age seventeen Billings began an apprenticeship with Robbins & Lawrence Co., gun makers and machinists in Windsor, Vermont. As was common at the time, Billings’s family agreed to provide board, lodging, and clothing in exchange for his instruction and a salary of fifty, then fifty-five, then sixty cents for the first, second, and third year of labor. Billings served his indenture then moved to Hartford to work at Colt’s Patent Fire Arms Manufacturing Co., which was then considered the premier gun maker on the East Coast.
Colt’s, which was located east of the neighborhood near the Connecticut River, was also an early laboratory for many early industrial innovators. There on the oil-soaked floors, Billings worked as a die-sinker in the drop-forging department, where the machinery was complicated and expensive to maintain. Drop forge is a process used to shape metal into complex shapes by dropping a heavy hammer with a die on its face onto a piece of metal. The process involved “a rough-forming stroke in a drop forge, a pressing operation to trim off the unwanted ‘flash,’ and a finishing stroke in another drop forge.”29
Weed Sewing Machine plant, c. 1889, Hartford, Connecticut.
In 1862 Billings moved to E. Remington & Sons in Utica, N.Y., where he began streamlining the drop-forging process and increased the company’s efficiency by “40-fold,” according to the 1901 Commemorative Biographical Record of Hartford County, Conn.30 After saving Remington some