Wilkinson Brothers Paper Mill: Shelton's Lost Pulp Mills

Canal Street Development Update — June 2026

🏗️Cedar Village at The Locks now stands at 281 Canal Street

Shelton developer Don Stanziale, Jr. and his firm Midland Development and Contracting have completed Cedar Village at The Locks, which fully opened on June 1, 2026. The riverfront apartment community sits directly on the former Naugatuck Valley Crucible and Wilkinson Brothers Paper Mill footprint, turning this industrial stretch of Canal Street into modern residential living.

Site

0 & 281 Canal St
1.87 acres

Mill demolished

82,321 sq ft
built late 1800s

Replacement

4-story residential
parking beneath

CT DEEP file

REM ID #22401
Voluntary Remediation

Why the buildings came down. The site was accepted into Connecticut's Abandoned Brownfield Cleanup Program on February 6, 2023, and entered the state Voluntary Remediation Program on May 30, 2023. Phase I assessments by AECOM (2021) and Berkshire Environmental (2022) identified seventeen areas of concern; subsurface work in 2003, 2004, 2021 and 2023 found petroleum hydrocarbons, PAHs, metals and PCBs in sixteen of them, with nine exceeding state Remediation Standard Regulations. The cleanup plan called for demolishing the mill, isolating impacted soil beneath the new building, and an Environmental Use Restriction on the parcel.

The lock is coming back. The same plan includes landscaping along the riverbank and reconstruction of the canal lock that historically sat at the northern end of the site — the one pictured further down this post.

Stanziale's other Canal Street projects — 255 Canal Street and the adjoining parcel at 235 Canal Street, the former home of APEX Tool & Cutter Company — will likely not be finished until 2027, depending on permitting and construction timelines.

🏠 Rental prices for Cedar Village at The Locks on Apartments.com.

📍 Cedar Village at The Locks occupies the same Canal Street footprint once held by the Wilkinson Brothers Paper Mill (1871–c. 1910), the Driscoll Wire Company (1917–1960s) and the Naugatuck Valley Crucible Company (1917–1932, then American Crucible to about 1951).

Ghost Factories along Canal Street E and the Housatonic River

Canal Street in Shelton, Connecticut, feels like a graveyard for American industry. Years ago, I walked down this very road to explore the Star Pin Company. Today, Star Pin is nothing but a cracked foundation and scattered rubble. But right next door, separated by a rusty gate, sat another forgotten giant.

I arrived too late to see any leftover machinery or the previous tenant's last setups. Cleanup crews had already taken over the site. Grey duct tape and thick plastic sheeting sealed off the window frames and doorways. Abatement workers were busy removing asbestos from the ancient boiler pipes. Nature had already started claiming the site, too. Back in May 2018, the local news reported that a section of the back building simply fell into the Housatonic River. Since then, the property had been used mostly for storage, auto repair and auto body work, with much of the building standing vacant. Still, slipping inside was surprisingly easy.

I came here on a mission. I wanted to find a hidden piece of the Wilkinson Brothers and Co Paper mill or the Naugatuck Valley Crucible Company. Specifically, I was hunting for something original from the past. Decades ago, long after the former paper mill or the factory stopped making paper products and black lead crucibles, workers built a brand new floor right on top of something. The relic was swallowed by progress.

I knew it had to be here somewhere. Stepping carefully through the dim light, I kept my eyes on the ground. The building was in rough shape. In the back room, the flooring had caved in completely, resting heavily on shallow foundation pillars. I scanned the wreckage, searching high and low.

The Floor Collapse That Revealed a Secret

Then, looking down into the jagged pit, I finally saw it.

The floor collapse had acted like an accidental archaeological dig. It peeled back the wood to reveal the rounded brickwork of a half-buried structure. Someone had spray-painted a few letters of graffiti right above it, leaving a modern scar on an antique wall. Staring at those bricks, you can almost hear the roar of the old fires. A century ago, products manufactured in this exact spot shipped out across the globe.

Finding something like this is a powerful reminder of the hidden worlds buried just beneath our feet. As old factory towns try to clean up and reinvent themselves, we are rapidly erasing the physical roots that built our modern economy. These sites matter because they tell the unpolished story of human labor.

Yet, history is rarely simple. As I studied the bricks, a small doubt crept into my mind. Before the crucible company ever arrived, the Wilkinson Brothers Paper Mill first launched the local pulp and paper industry along this hairpin pocket of the river.

Was I truly looking at something historic? Was I truly looking at a kiln or some type of crucible? Or did the broken floor just reveal the circular brick base of the paper mill's long-demolished smokestack?

The ruins were not offering up any easy answers. But whether it once melted metal or pumped smoke into the sky, that buried circle of bricks stands as a quiet monument to the busy, noisy world that once powered this riverside town. From the Wilkinson Brothers Paper Mill in the north end to the Whitcomb Metallic Bedstead Company in the south end stood others in between: U. S. Rubber Reclaiming Works, Wilcox and Howe Co Carriage Hardware, J. and G. Griffin Manufacturers (The Griffin Button Co), Derby Rubber Company Factory No. 1, The Silver Plate Cutlery Company, The Adams Manufacturing Company Cotton Mill, Consolidated Railway Electrical Lighting & Equipment Company, Sidney Blumenthal & Co Inc Silk Mill, Shelton Co Bolt & Tack, The Huntington Piano Company, The Robert N. Bassett Co, and the many companies and factories that called it their place of business. They no longer stand tall and mighty along a forever changed Canal Street.

The Housatonic River has always been more than just water. For the city of Shelton, Connecticut, the river was the fuel for a revolution. If you walk down Canal Street today, you will now see bright modern apartments and condominiums. But over a century ago, this very street was the loud, beating heart of American industry. An 1838 attempt to dam the river here had been beaten back by the shad fishery lobby. It took until 1864 for the Ousatonic Water Company, headed by Edward Shelton, to convince the state legislature that a high dam need not block the spawning run. Construction began in 1867 under chief engineer H. P. Potter, and much of his design survives: a curved masonry gravity dam 870 feet long and 22 feet high, with headgates feeding canals on both banks. The west canal — the long one, used for both power and navigation — ran 5,600 feet, 60 feet wide at the waterline and 12 feet deep. In just thirteen years, between 1867 and 1880, a farming and fishing village called Huntington became the industrial city of Shelton: twelve mills, fifteen firms, about 2,000 horsepower consumed daily and more than a thousand people at work.

William Wilkinson and the Paper Mill That Wouldn't Die

It all started with an immigrant's grand vision. William Wilkinson arrived from England ready to make his mark. In the early 1860s, he set up his first paper mill in New York City. However, he soon realized that true industrial power required a better location. He leased water and land at the northern edge of the newly finished Shelton Canal from the Ousatonic Water Company, and in 1871 and 1872 Wilkinson Brothers & Company put up their extensive mills there — the first of the twelve factories to occupy the upper end of the canal.

The Shelton Canal Lock. Unsure if it is operable.

Housatonic River views that tenants will be able to see.

A covered deck on top of the new development will have much better views than the former roof of Naugatuck Valley Crucible Co.

Wilkinson's business was booming. The water powered his machines, and the orders poured in. But industrial work in the nineteenth century was incredibly dangerous. On November 4, 1878, disaster struck. A massive fire ripped through the mill, wiping out the entire structure and leaving behind a devastating $150,000 loss.

For many business owners, watching their life's work turn to ashes would be the end of the story. Wilkinson was different. He rolled up his sleeves and got straight to work. In an astonishing four months and eighteen days — a figure recorded by Orcutt and Beardsley in their 1880 history of Derby, and credited to William Wilkinson's "remarkable energy and perseverance" — the ruins were cleared and the mill was rebuilt, and the manufacture of paper began again. That brick layout, extended in stages between 1878 and 1898 into roughly ten connected blocks, no longer stands between the canal and the river today.

Back in business, the mill churned out manila-colored envelope and hardware papers. By 1880 the firm employed seventy hands and turned out over a million dollars' worth of paper a year, and Orcutt and Beardsley judged it "surpassed by no paper mill in the country." The partners at that point were William Wilkinson, Sr., Thomas P. Wilkinson, William H. Leach, Charles A. Wheedon and George S. Arnold. In August 1894 the local press noted that Wilkinson Bros & Co had a contract to make a small amount of paper for the federal government. On the Sanborn sheets the plant appears under shifting names — Derby Mills in June 1892 and November 1896, then Wilkinson Brothers & Co Paper and Sulphite Pulp Mills, then Derby Paper Mills Co by October 1901 — and locals simply called the whole place the Derby Mills.

But times change, and smart factory towns know how to adapt. As the new century arrived, the massive brick complex began to shift from a single business into a busy neighborhood of innovation. In 1906, the Star Pin Company bought a two-story building at the southern end of the plant, and part of the complex went to The Bleached Fibre Company. The papermaking itself did not last to the end of the decade. On November 10, 1910, the Paper Trade Journal carried a for-sale advertisement for "the factory plant building and machinery formerly owned and operated by the Derby Paper Mills Company at Shelton, Conn." — including a four-cylinder machine with seventy-five dryers — listed under Charles N. Downs of Derby as owner. The Wilkinson era of papermaking was already over by then; 1917 is the year the building itself was carved in half and sold to two new manufacturers.

Wire, Pins, and the Driscoll Wire Company

The Driscoll Wire Company stepped up to fill the void on the south side. William F. Driscoll incorporated the business in 1917 with just $30,000 in capital. Two years later, management shifted to Philip E. French and company president J. Howard Marlin. They turned the wire company into an absolute powerhouse. According to a 1930 article in the Hartford Courant, the factory's total output skyrocketed by a thousand percent in its first ten years.

Inside those noisy walls, workers crafted low-carbon wire of all different finishes and tempers. That wire became the rivets, screws, pins, hairpins, and buckles that Americans used every day. A state manufacturers' directory of the period lists Driscoll Wire Co. of Shelton under "steel wire," in the fifty-to-one-hundred employee bracket — on the same page as Star Pin Co. and Naugatuck Valley Crucible Co. By 1951, they employed a tight-knit crew of sixty people who specialized in cold-drawn steel wire and commercial heat treating. Wire manufacturing continued on the site into the 1960s, making Driscoll the longest-running tenant of the whole complex.

While the south side of the complex stretched wire, the north side melted metal.

The Naugatuck Valley Crucible Company

In 1917, local businessman David N. Clark bought the northern half of the old paper mill — roughly ten red brick blocks put up between 1878 and 1898. Clark was already a prominent figure in Shelton. He had started a highly successful hardware firm in 1882 and founded the Shelton Metallic Filler Company in 1890. Armed with $250,000 in funding, he launched the Naugatuck Valley Crucible Company.

They made crucibles, which are heat-resistant pots used to melt down raw metals. These heavy containers were essential for Connecticut's thriving brass industry. The company constantly evolved its lineup. A 1922 advertisement showed off their graphite crucibles, metal stirrers, and phosphorizers. By 1930, they had added black lead crucibles to the catalog and shortened the name to the Naugatuck Valley Company.

By 1932, the firm had merged with the Chicago Crucible Company and changed its name again, this time to the American Crucible Company. It quickly grew into one of the largest crucible manufacturers in the country, building heavy-duty pots for oil- and coke-fired furnaces, brass rolling mills and steel melting. American Crucible occupied the old paper mill through the middle of the century; by 1951 the company is recorded on Washington Avenue in North Haven, Connecticut, rather than Shelton.

The history of this site is a masterclass in adaptation. Over the years, that same brick complex housed even more businesses. The Bleached Fibre Company made paper stock there, and Better Packages Inc. manufactured packing tape dispensers at 255 Canal Street. After the wire and crucible years, the building was given over to the manufacture and servicing of mailing machines — the site appears in state environmental files as the former Ascom Hasler property — along with a hydraulic repair shop, and finally vehicle storage, auto repair and auto body painting.

Earlier this year, the last of those strong walls was finally dismantled and hauled away to make room for the current housing development. The factory workers, the paper machines, and the miles of steel wire are now completely gone.

I never did solve that mystery. Standing on Canal Street today, looking at the fresh paint and new apartment walls, that buried circle of bricks still weighs on my mind. It is a powerful reminder of how we constantly build our future directly on top of our past. We may have traded paper, packing twine, and heavy wire for Cedar Village at the Locks riverfront apartments, but the spirit of adaptation still powers this riverside town once again.

Reader Callout

🏭 Did You Work at Naugatuck Valley Crucible, Driscoll Wire, or the Derby Mills?

Were you or a family member employed at the Naugatuck Valley Crucible Company, American Crucible Company, Driscoll Wire, Ascom Hasler, or the Wilkinson Brothers Paper Mill? Do you have photos from inside the Canal Street complex, old crucibles, product catalogs, wire samples, or stories from when these factories still hummed along the Housatonic? With every building on the parcel now demolished, your memories are the primary record of this layered industrial site.

📩 Share Your Memory → or drop a comment below — full credit given to every contributor.

Keep Reading

🏭 More Connecticut Industrial History

From crucibles and hairpins to paperboard, machine tools and textile mills — the factories that built Connecticut, and what became of them.

Star Pin Company, Shelton The mill next door on Canal Street, now a cracked foundation and scattered rubble. → Brown's Mill: Inside CT's Abandoned Paper Mill Another Connecticut papermaking survivor, still standing and still full of machinery. → Former H. J. Mills Paper Box Company Where the paper ended up: a New England box plant and its abandoned floors. → Hendey Machine Co.'s Historic Complex Torrington's lathe builder — the machine tools behind Connecticut's brass and wire trades. →

🏭 The Naugatuck Valley Crucible Company operated at 281 Canal Street from 1917, becoming the Naugatuck Valley Company about 1930 and the American Crucible Company by 1932 after merging with the Chicago Crucible Company. Driscoll Wire held the south half from 1917 into the 1960s. Both buildings were demolished in 2026 for Cedar Village at The Locks.

Source(s):

1. Shelton Herald. (2018, May 29). Building partially collapses on Canal Street. Shelton Herald.
2. (n.a.). Naugatuck Valley Crucible Co. Connecticut Mills / Making Places.
3. Metal Industry. (1923). United States: Metal Industry Publishing Company. Google Books.
4. Orcutt, S., & Beardsley, A. (1880). The history of the old town of Derby, Connecticut, 1642–1880, pp. 408–409. Press of Springfield Printing Company.
5. Paper Trade Journal, Vol. 33, No. 26 (1901, December 26). Derby Mills Company, Shelton, Conn., and E. T. Wilkinson of Wilkinson Brothers & Co. at the New York manufacturers' meeting.
6. Paper Trade Journal, Vol. 51, No. 19 (1910, November 10). For-sale notice: "The factory plant building and machinery formerly owned and operated by the Derby Paper Mills Company at Shelton, Conn.," Charles N. Downs, owner, Derby, Conn.
7. Roth, M. (1980). Connecticut: An Inventory of Historic Engineering and Industrial Sites — Shelton Canal Industrial District (1867), pp. 33–35. Society for Industrial Archeology.
8. Connecticut Manufacturers and Products (Shelton listings, p. 30), including Driscoll Wire Co. and Naugatuck Valley Crucible Co.
9. Berkshire Environmental Services & Technology, LLC. (2024, January 16). Analysis of Brownfields Cleanup Alternatives — Preliminary Evaluation, Former Ascom Hasler, 0 & 281 Canal Street, Shelton, Connecticut.
10. Naugatuck Valley Council of Governments. Community Relations Plan, 281 Canal Street, Shelton, Connecticut (U.S. EPA Brownfields / CT DEEP).
11. (1912) Sanborn Fire Insurance Map from Derby, New Haven County, Connecticut. Sanborn Map Company, Apr. [Map] Retrieved from the Library of Congress.
12. (1906) Sanborn Fire Insurance Map from Derby, New Haven County, Connecticut. Sanborn Map Company, Oct. [Map] Retrieved from the Library of Congress.
13. (1901) Sanborn Fire Insurance Map from Derby, New Haven County, Connecticut. Sanborn Map Company, Oct. [Map] Retrieved from the Library of Congress.
14. (1892) Sanborn Fire Insurance Map from Birmingham, New Haven County, Connecticut. Sanborn Map Company, Jun. [Map] Retrieved from the Library of Congress.
15. The Connecticut Western News / Connecticut Digital Newspaper Program (1894, August 24). Note that Wilkinson Bros & Co held a contract to make paper for the government.
16. Gioiele, B. (2020, May 7). Shelton receives $700K in federal brownfields grants. CT Insider.
17. Gioiele, B. (2023, March 15). Shelton 129-unit apartment project on Canal Street nears approval. CT Insider.
18. Gioiele, B. (2026, March 15). Shelton developer proposes 48-unit condo plan for Canal Street in between other planned apartments. CT Insider.
19. Gioiele, B. (2026, March 29). Another major housing project is coming to Shelton's fast-changing Canal Street. New Haven Register.