The Romance of Norwalk

The beginning of the second half of the nineteenth cen¬ tury found Norwalk embroiled in a game of put and take with Fairfield and Bridgeport, over the location of a new county courthouse. Up to this time there had been one courthouse in Danbury and another in Fairfield. The Dan¬ bury building was still in good condition, but it was found necessary to replace the Fairfield courthouse, that had been built in 1794. This courthouse replaced the one built in 1720 and destroyed by the British in 1779. The state was of a mind to do one of three things: rebuild the courthouse in Fairfield, move it to Bridgeport, or move it to Norwalk. The latter proposition naturally appealed to this town which made a valiant effort to gain the courthouse only to lose the race because Bridgeport had more dollars than Norwalk. The wrangle began in 1833. In December of that year Thaddeus Betts, Clark Bissell, Timothy Tellerwain and Charles Thomas were named a committee to get in touch with the selectmen in the towns of Fairfield county to feel them out on the subject of moving the county courthouse and gaol from Fairfield to Norwalk. In the spring of the next year the town voted against locating the county build¬ ings in Bridgeport and ordered the committee aforenamed to use all lawful means to secure the courthouse for Nor¬ walk. Every six months regularly for several years there¬ after, Norwalk voted against the removal of the county buildings to Bridgeport and insisted that this town offered a much more suitable location. The General Assembly at Hartford was petitioned time and again without result. April 8, 1850, the town appointed a fresh committee com¬ posed of Josiah Carter, Jonathan Camp, jr., Charles Isaacs, Thomas Robinson, Stephen Smith and Orris Ferry, to apply to the General Assembly. But alas, Norwalk seemed to gain no headway in the matter and three years later on May 2, 1853 the town was still protesting and on that date voted to petition the General Assembly and ask that the mat¬ ter be put to vote in the county. The same year, 1853, the NORWALK IN 1850 269 courts were removed from Fairfield to Bridgeport. The first county courthouse in Bridgeport was occupied in 1855 and was “a neat and substantial brown stone structure lo¬ cated on a public square which is bounded on three sides by State, Broad and Bank sts., and on its fourth side by private property.” Today this same building is Bridgeport’s city hall. Naturally, for some time after the removal of the county courthouse from Fairfield to Bridgeport, the quarrel among the towns and cities in the county subsided. It was re¬ vived in the ’8o’s, when it was decided the county needed a new and larger courthouse. Norwalk at once took up the sword of battle and with all her might strove to have the county courthouse and other county buildings located in this city. Her best statesmen and lawyers fought for the cause. Norwalk saw victory within reach in the year 1886, as the result of a fine idea which suddenly came to the town fathers. This idea involved presenting the Le Grand Lock- wood property, now known as the Mathews estate, on West ave., opposite the Norwalk high school and the Armory, to the county of Fairfield, provided the new county court house and jail were placed in Norwalk on the property. Two ex¬ clamation marks were placed in the town records after this last “provided” statement, showing that Norwalk meant business and wasn’t going to be fooled. One hundred thou¬ sand dollars was voted by the selectmen for “the construc¬ tion of a county courthouse and other county buildings and in procuring a site for the same within the town of Nor¬ walk.” In spite of this very generous offer, Norwalk lost and Bridgeport won, and the reason was said to have been because the latter city was able to offer more money than could Norwalk. The new courthouse was built in Bridge¬ port on Golden hill in 1888. HATTING Chapter XXV Ebenezer Church Pioneer in Norzvalk Hatting — Progress of Industry — Organization of Crofut and Knapp Co. — PIozv Hats are Made — Strike of 1884-85 — Factory Blown Up — Strike of iqoq — Present Hat Companies. The backbone of Norwalk industries may be said to be divided between the oyster fisheries and hatting. The lat¬ ter came into prominence in this community with the found¬ ing of the Crofut and Knapp company in Norwalk in 1858. Hatting was now a virile trade in the community. Every year was another year of progress. True, there were set¬ backs: the strike of 1884-85 and the strike of 1909 left indelible marks on the industry. At the same time, these strikes signify definite steps of advancement in the raising of the trade to the prosperous status it enjoys today. The Crofut and Knapp company stands as a sort of nu¬ cleus around which a certain portion of Norwalk’s history has evolved, the company being not only part and parcel of that history, but to a large extent, the moving factor in it. Down through the years it has become more or less of an institution in Norwalk. Today, it employs more than 1,500 who annually turn out some $10,000,000 worth of hats. The Crofut and Knapp Co. may be the largest of its kind in the city but it was not the first. As a matter of fact, hatting gained a firm foothold in Norwalk before the War of the Revolution. EARLY HATTERS Ebenezer Church is the only pioneer hatter in Norwalk of which we have record and the preservation of his history 270 HATTING 271 is due in great measure to the efforts of the Norwalk Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution, which chapter is now the proud possessor of the quaint bullet holed sign, which once hung over Mr. Church’s emporium. The Norwalk hatter was born in 1719 and died in 1799. He came to this town but a lad of 16 and immediately commenced study of the hat trade in a small shop on the Green. The fact that he studied the trade under someone else after his arrival in Norwalk leads one to believe that the hatting industry must have been pretty well established in this community before he came. At any rate, Church applied himself diligently to study and so far progressed that in 1745 he felt able to strike out for himself. In that year he pur¬ chased the land which borders on the Westport road and “Worth Brook,” and immediately constructed a small house and a shop, the sign of which now hangs in the D. A. R. quarters on Mill Hill. According to the D. A. R., the site of the shop may be located on the road from Norwalk to Westport on the left hand side of the road at the corner of the first road to the left of the Fairfield County Chil¬ dren’s Home on the Post road. It is added that the lilacs which were in the original garden may still be seen. Church’s shop, which escaped destruction during the Revolutionary War, was honored as a refuge place for Mrs. Thomas Fitch, wife of the governor of Connecticut, who fled from her home on East ave., when the “redcoats” took possession of the town. Mr. Church sold three kinds of hats: beavers at 38 shil¬ lings; casters at 28; and work hats at six shillings. They were shipped to Long Island, to the Hudson river towns and through western Connecticut. In dull seasons, the re¬ sourceful hatter sold pork, butter, shoes, cider, plums, to¬ bacco, potatoes, stockings and deer skins. The Church hat¬ ter sign which hung for some time outside the D. A. R. house on Mill hill and is now on the inside of the building, came into the possession of the chapter in 1924. Eleven hat and cap factories employing a total of 83 272 ROMANCE OF NORWALK persons were recorded in the Norwalk statistics of 1845. These factories had a total output of 36,000 articles value $71,840. Capital to the extent of $27,500 was invested in the companies. On Edwin Hall’s rriap of 1847, four hat shops are plainly marked; one on the corner of Webster st. and West ave.; a second, “Mallory and Hanford’s Hat Shop” on the east side of Garner st. almost to West ave., a third on Cedar st., in the middle of the road, opposite the present home of Mr. and Mrs. Arthur Terris, 3 Cedar st. and a fourth on the Green, corner of Park st., and North ave. Undoubtedly the rest of the hat companies of the year are marked on the map either merely as “shops” or under the owner’s name without qualification. The first hats in the American colonies were made in Connecticut, it being believed that Danbury was the first town in the country to offer a finished hat for sale. Nor¬ walk early delved into the mysteries of hatting and at least one of the eight families which left the community in 1684 to found Danbury boasted an experienced hatter. The first hat shops were small rooms where the men gathered about a kettle heated by a wood fire and pulled or hauled the bodies of coarse fur with their own hands at the rate of one an hour. In the early days, the beaver hat was really made of beaver and was a tall, bell shaped affair with a heavily rolled brim. A good beaver hat was the mark of gentility, lasted a lifetime and was commonly passed on from father to son. The process of hatting in the early days in this district differed materially from the hatting process of today. The fur was cut from the pelts and the long hairs separated from the soft fur mat with patient fingers. Then came the “bow¬ ing.” This involved snapping the catgut string of a bow again and again on a pile of loose fur until the foreign sub¬ stances were freed and it was matted into what finally be¬ came the fur fabric of the hat. The fur mat was then shaped into a large cone and alternately dipped into boiling water and rolled until it had shrunk to one quarter of the HATTING 273 original size. This product was then fashioned into the semblance of a hat. The last process was in the hands of the women who plucked out with tweezers, those hairs which still remained sticking in the nap. Few hats were sold finished. Most of them were delivered in the rough to New York firms where they were finished and trimmed. i PROGRESS OF HATTING