After 70 Years –

Heise-Dresser Plant To Leave Newtown

By Steve Bigham

The Heise-Dresser facility on South Main Street is up for sale and the company has plans to relocate to Shelton. The asking price for the 38,000- square-foot facility is $2.1 million.

Rumors that the Newtown company was on its way out first surfaced more than a year ago. This week, they were finally confirmed. A “for sale” sign in front of the building let it be known to all: Heise Dresser is on its way out.

“We are consolidating three plants in Connecticut of which we’re one of. We are going to be moving to Shelton,” explained plant manager Phil Reed Tuesday. “The planning process has been in place for more than a year. We will begin to move over the next several months.”

Mr Reed has worked at the Newtown facility since the late 1970s.

Several potential buys have made inquiries, but the company still remained on the market this week. The company plans to move with or without the building being sold. Most employees will keep their jobs.

The Newtown facility is now part of the much larger Dresser Industries, Inc., of Houston, Texas – one of the world’s largest suppliers of high-tech products and services to worldwide energy and natural resources and industrial markets.

The Newtown plant sits on approximately 10 acres of land and offers a balance of both office and factory space.

“Any manufacturing could go there,” Mr Reed said.

First Selectman Herb Rosenthal said the town has made efforts to keep the company in town as it employs many residents from the area. However, the decision was a corporate one and out of the hands of local company officials.

Otto W. Heise started the Heise Bourdon Tube Company in the late 1920s and moved it from Bridgeport to Newtown a few years later. He set up shop in a colonial home near his own home on Brushy Hill Road. There, he developed a line of pressure gauges that became the premier pressure measurement tools in the world.

In 1961, he built the South Main Street facility to accommodate the massive amount of business he picked up from the  up from the aerospace and ship building industries. In 1967 he built an addition, complete with a domed observatory with a powerful telescope that allowed him to gaze at the heavens — the same heavens that NASA was watching with the help of Mr Heise’s gauges.

Mr Heise died at age 77 in 1972. Dresser Industries, Inc., of Dallas, Texas, purchased his company the following year.

The top of the observatory has long been welded shut and the telescope was given to The Taft School in Watertown. Mr Heise often invited high school students to explore the universe inside his observatory.

A 15,000 square foot addition in 1980 increased the size of the Newtown building to 40,000 square feet.

During his lifetime, Mr Heise was generous to the town, donating $25,000 to build the swimming pool at Newtown High School, $30,000 for improvements at Edmond Town Hall, and $10,000 to improve Taylor football field behind Hawley School.