Identifier: hartfordconnasma00hart (find matches)
Title: Hartford, Conn., as a manufacturing, business and commercial center; with brief sketches of its history, attractions, leading industries, and institutions ..
Year: 1889 (1880s)
Authors: Hartford (Conn.). Board of Trade
Subjects: Hartford (Conn.) -- Commerce Hartford (Conn.) -- Industries Hartford (Conn.) -- Description and travel
Publisher: Hartford, Board of Trade
Contributing Library: University of Connecticut Libraries
Digitizing Sponsor: University of Connecticut Libraries

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set up, on Hockanum river, a forge formaking bar-iron, and a mill for iron slitting. Three years later, par-liament passed an act prohibiting the continuance in the colonies ofiron mills and furnaces for making steel, under a penalty of two hun-dred pounds, and thus at birth was throttled a promising industry.J Hiring the Revolution, in the same buildings, powder was made illlarge quantities, by the Pitkin family, for the Continental army, forwhich they were afterwards compensated in part by grants of exclu-sive privileges in the manufacture of glass and snuff. In 1782, theywere also forging anchors, and making mill-screws and nail-rods.Here, in 1797, were cast the guns which Elisha Pitkin gave to theold artillery company. Most of the prominent families of Connecticut during the eight-eenth century found in politics and in the professions spheres forthe exercise of their superfluous energies, but the Pitkins were alsoirrepressible leaders in the modern industrial movement, which long
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mmmmm I ■ r > 11 V I.I.I, IAKK ANT) C API l< i(.. MISCELLANEOUS INDUSTRIES. 79 struggled against heavy difficulties, but which, after the adoption ofthe constitution of 1818, soon took a foremost place in winning wealthand influence. In a mill built by Elisha Pitkin about 1770, at thelowest privilege on the Hockanum, was set up the first wool-carding-machine run by power in the State, and probably in the country.Felt was made here in 1807 by Joseph, son of Ehsha, under a patentfor making cloth without yarn. Samuel Pitkin, with John Warbur-ton, an Englishman, as overseer, started the first successful cottonfactory in Connecticut, known to the present generation as the UnionManufacturing Company. For the past forty years the family hasbeen honorably represented in the industrial activities of Hartfordby the Pitkin Brothers, of whom more will be said elsewhere. Before the revolution, John Austin made silver spoons and otherarticles of luxury for the wealthy, working, from lack of

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