Frog Hollow. Susan Campbell
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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 lessons, after which he wrote an unpublished manuscript titled “Taming the Bicycle.” A boater all his life (his pen name, after all, came from riverboats), he insisted on calling the handlebar a tiller and ended the essay with, “Get a bicycle. You will not regret it, if you live.”58
Other manufacturing companies such as Ford and Singer built stores to sell their products. Pope did not. If a consumer wanted to purchase a bike, the buyer had to go to a hardware store or visit an agent who sold Columbias.59 That quirk did not seem to keep customers away, and Pope knew it wouldn’t. A Columbia was a specialty item, and so was its owner. Pope was appealing to the modern man—most riders were male—who was willing to stand out in a crowd and spend no small amount of energy tracking down his product. Other manufacturing luminaries, including Henry Ford, came to visit the Hartford plant for inspiration. Before Ford became famous for it, Pope’s employees used interchangeable bicycle wheels, tires, and gear-shaft drive mechanisms, a technique they learned from Fairfield and one borrowed by Ford with great success.
Early bicycles were mostly ridden by men. Female cyclists had to first be convinced to wear bloomers (or “rational dress”) to allow for peddling. 1895. Courtesy of Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, D.C. 20540.
By 1896 the plant had a thousand machines turning out screws at tens of thousands per minute, according to a 1918 American Machinist magazine article. The machines included “milling machines, turret lathes, screw machines, grinding machines, drilling and boring machines.”60 Within ten years, Pope stood before a crowd in Philadelphia and said that American-made bicycles had taken over the world market—in part because the Hartford factory included an entire division devoted to modifying the product to suit the riders of a particular country’s needs.61 Pope’s Hartford operations grew to include five factories that employed four thousand people.62 Meanwhile, in an 1896 interview with the London-based publication Cycling World, Pope said there was no limit to the bicycle market. At $125 the bicycle was pricey for the average consumer, yet sales quickly hit one thousand a year. George Keller, who designed Pope’s factory housing, told his wife that Pope couldn’t even sell him a bicycle because the factory had orders they couldn’t begin to fulfill. (Keller also designed Bushnell Park’s “Soldiers and Sailors Memorial Arch,” of Portland brownstone.63 His ashes are buried in the arch along with the ashes of his wife, Mary.)
Early (and bizarre) Columbia bicycle ad.
While the bicycle design was vamped and revamped, the Hartford plant was among the first in the country to switch from coal to kerosene fuel.64 Ever the competitor, Pope began buying patents as quickly as he could. Ford did the same thing. Pope also employed a knack for self-promotion unrivaled by any of his contemporaries, save perhaps Barnum. In this, Ford could not compete. Pope once told an interviewer that his perfect employee was the most faithful fellow in the world. “He has been in my employ for 17 years, yet he has never even asked for a holiday. He works both day and night, is never asleep or intoxicated, and though I pay him more than $250,000 a year, I consider that he costs me nothing. His name is Advertisement.”65
Pope mostly treated his (human) employees as