Date: Fri 30-Aug-1996

Publication: Bee

Author: KAAREN

Quick Words:

history-Hattertown-Hats

Full Text:

w/photos: Hattertown: Newtown's Bequest From The Hatting Trade

B Y K AAREN V ALENTA

The casual observer passing through Hattertown today isn't likely to realize

that 150 years ago the quaint little area of historic homes was a thriving

community with four hat shops, a comb and button shop, two blacksmith shops,

two wagon shops, a general store and a grist mill.

The Green, a small triangular-shaped piece of land bordered by roads and

intersected by Lewis Brook, is the heart of Hattertown. It is here that Elam

Benedict came in 1821 with his wife and their 11 children from Bethel, which

was then part of Danbury. Benedict's ancestors were among the first settlers

of Danbury and the first to have been involved in the hatting industry when

the Industrial Revolution began in the late 1700s.

How hatting came to Newtown and left its legacy in Hattertown was researched

by Town Historian Daniel Cruson ( The Rooster's Crow , January-February 1993)

and, more recently, by Jan Cunningham, a National Register consultant hired by

the State Historical Commission. The state commission will meet October 3 in

Hartford to decide whether to ask the US Department of the Interior to place

Hattertown on the National Register of Historic Places.

By 1800, hat production in Danbury had reached 20,000 hats a year, requiring a

large supply of felt. To meet the demand, hatters imported fur pelts from

other countries and used domestic rabbit hair and wool to supplement the local

supply. Some Danbury hatters decided to set up shops in neighboring towns,

such as Bethel, where local and cheaper fur was more readily available. Their

sons, in turn, moved on to more distant hamlets, like Newtown.

Along with button and comb shops, hatting was carried on in small shops

scattered all over town. At its height in the 1840s there were seven hat

"factories" operating in Newtown with a total of 56 employees who made 30,400

hats in the year 1846 alone. Individual sites and houses associated with

hatting families throughout the region have been identified, but Hattertown

was one of the few places where an entire village was directly involved in the

trade.

Levi Taylor was 40 years old when he moved to Hattertown from Bethel soon

after his youngest son, William, was born in 1819. Levi moved into the small

cape which faces the Hattertown Green and probably enlarged the house at that

time to accommodate his family of seven children. Elam Benedict bought the

house next door and, with Mr Taylor as his partner, set up Newtown's first

hatting shop on the north side of Hattertown Road, where it intersects with

Castle Meadow Road.

A Natural Habitat

There were several advantages in this section of Newtown for those in the

hatting industry. Brooks and ponds formed a natural habitat for muskrat and

beaver. There also was a nucleus of a village already in place, one of many

small farming settlements in the town's riverine valleys.

Although remote, the village was not isolated from the outside world; it was

connected by the Monroe-Newtown Turnpike (now Hattertown Road). Access to this

highway was important, because the Benedicts and the Taylors would not be

independent producers or local retailers. Instead, their hatshops were

outposts of a regional trade network. They supplied rough-formed hats, which

were either sold to wholesalers in Danbury or shippped directly to New York

"front shops" for finishing.

Within a year after moving to Newtown, Elam Benedict died. His son, George,

replaced his father in the partnership. When Levi Taylor died the following

year, George Benedict took over the entire business, initially employing six

men. His work load soon expanded and he doubled his workforce.

William Taylor also became a hatter but, like his father, he died in his early

40s. Being a hatter was a hazardous career. Many died young from mercury

poisoning, a debilitating condition which gave rise to the expression "mad as

a hatter." It wasn't until the end of the 19th century that mercury was

banned, largely due to the efforts of unions in Danbury to improve labor

conditions industrywide.

From fabricating the fur felt to forming the product, hatting involved a

series of labor-intensive processes, many of which were dirty and hazardous.

The animal pelts first were washed and dried, then mercury was used to remove

the fur from the skins.

Bonding the cut fur, sometimes mixed with wool, into felt required pressure

and heat, usually with hand-operated presses. Hat forming was done by hand.

Unlike most other early industries, none of these processes required specially

designed buildings or waterpower to run equipment, so hatmaking could take

place in cottages or small free-standing outbuildings near a brook or stream.

By the 1840s, hat styles changed and George Benedict began producing napped

hats. These were basically wool has with a nap of fur added to give the

finished hat a smooth, silky texture. In 1848 Mr Benedict purchased one of the

first machines available to help speed up the finishing processes.

Other Hat Shops

In addition to Mr Benedict's shop, three others were set up in Hattertown. In

1843 Daniel Northrop opened a business on the west side of Hattertown Road

just above the junction with Hi Barlow Road. Mr Northrop was a prominent man

in town, serving in the Connecticut legislature in 1847. He apparently was

more successful in politics than in hatting, however, because his shop failed

in 1848 and he moved to New Jersey to try his luck there.

Harvey Briscoe opened a hat shop just south of Northrop's in 1835. His shop

also failed in 1848 so he moved to New York to work as a foreman in a hat shop

in Brooklyn. He didn't give up on Newtown, however, returning shortly after

1855 to set up a hat shop in Hawleyville.

The fourth shop was run by George Morehouse in the rear of the building that

would later become Morgan's General Store, located on the west side of

Hattertown Road between the junctions of Castle Meadow and Hi Barlow Roads. Mr

Morehouse began his business life in Hattertown making combs in 1840 but,

failing at that, turned to the manufacture of matches. This too, failed, so he

began hatting in 1850, a business which failed in 1854.

By the 1840s, changes in the industry sounded the death knell for local

hatting. After the depletion of the region's fur-bearing animals, all fur had

to be imported. More importantly, all the stages of fur processing and hat

forming were becoming fully mechanized, especially in Danbury. Local hatshops

could not compete with urban hat factory which had sophisticated water- and

steam-powered systems and a large skilled workforce. Although hatting

persisted in Hattertown at least through 1856, soon after the Civil War

hatting was fully reconsolidated in Danbury which had become a major railroad

junction with a ready supply of immigrant labor. Danbury supplied

international markets by the 1920s and became known as the Hat Capital of the

World.

Although 40 prosperous years in the hatting trade produced Hattertown, it was

the village's later history that preserved its resources. When hatting died

out, the same families stayed on in the same houses, many turning to farming,

and kept the houses and their outbuildings in good repair. In frugal Yankee

fashion, several attached obsolete hatshops to enlarge their houses, so even

those artifacts have survived.

Local Architecture

Many of the Taylor and Benedict children purchased and built homes in

Hattertown. Elam Benedict's nephew, Gad Benedict, probably was the first of

his family to build there. He hired Isaac Patchen, a local craftsman who built

at least five, and possibly six, of the houses near the Hattertown Green. Mr

Patchen's house retained the basic colonial design of rooms surrounding a

central chimney but they were updated with Federal or Greek Revival details,

as was common in this period.

The children of Hattertown attended school in "Gregory's Orchard," one of 21

separate school districts were were established throughout Newtown in the late

18th century. The school was built in 1788 and is located on private property

at Hattertown Road and Aunt Park Lane.

According to the map of 1905, three of the Benedict houses and one Taylor

house still were owned by their respective families at that time. As was so

often the case in New England villages, the surviving heirs were unmarried

women. Among them was Celiste A. Benedict, a physician in the village, who

kept the Elam Benedict house even after she moved her practice to Bridgeport.

As late as 1971, the Charles Benedict house was still owned by a granddaughter

and her husband, Handley Tipton, who had a pair of prize-winning oxen and

operated the last working farm near The Green.

In 1969 a committee composed of Benjamin Blanchard, John B. Farwell, George W.

Northrop, Paul Smith, and Mrs Hastings Morse were appointed to a historic

district study committee. As a result of their efforts, and the efforts of

many other local residents, the Hattertown Historic District was formed in

1970.

"With its gleaming white houses and red barns, the Hattertown Historic

District is the quintessential Connecticut village, so often imagined but

rarely found," Jan Cunningham said in the National Register application.

"Though the sights, sounds and odors of the bustling hat trade are long gone,

a picturesque historic landscape of exceptional intregity remains. Little has

changed since the 19th century."