Virjune Manufacturing Co: Inside Waterbury's Vacant Factory










J and I were already having a rough day. We'd just driven across town to check out an old industrial site he hadn't visited in a while, only to find it erased. Nothing left but a slab of concrete and chain-link fence.


So we took a detour. Sometimes you salvage a disappointing afternoon with a backup plan, even if you're just ticking a box.


The former Virjune plant hides in plain sight off Thomaston Avenue. If you drive past in summer, you'll miss it completely. Trees and shrubs swallow the building whole, nature reclaiming what industry left behind. Come winter, though, when the branches go bare and the world turns gray, the red brick skeleton reveals itself. Even then, you have to know where to look.
















I pulled up old Sanborn maps to trace the building's history. The earliest tenant was an auto body shop in 1922. By February 1950, something bigger had moved in. The map labels it simply "Stamping Wks." No company name. No flourish. Just function.


That namelessness felt strange. This was Waterbury's Waterville section, practically in the shadow of the massive Scovill Manufacturing Company plant on Stevens Street, the former American Pin Company complex that once employed thousands. Everyone knew Scovill. But this stamping works? Anonymous.


Eventually, the site became home to Virjune Manufacturing Company. They made the small, essential things: cosmetic packaging, screws and eyelets for lamps, precision parts for machines. Die and grinding work for other manufacturers. The kind of products you never think about until you need them.


In the 1980s and 1990s, Virjune was acquired by VCA, which at the time went by Metal Fabrication. The operation changed hands and names like a game of industrial musical chairs: Eyelet Design, Specialty Packaging, Owens-Brockway. I pieced this timeline together not from corporate records or historical societies, but from obituaries. Dozens of them, scattered across decades. People who spent entire careers there, who retired under one name or another, whose lives were shaped by work inside those red brick walls.


The parent company, Eyelet Design Inc, still does business in Waterbury. But this particular plant, the one off Thomaston Avenue, has been empty since at least 1989. More than three decades of silence.















What's left now barely counts as a building. The roof is gone. Rain and snow fall straight through to the floor. Metal cylinder pots, relics of some production process, sit rusting beneath a tangle of brush and saplings. Trees grow where workers once stood.


Whether the site will ever be cleaned up and marketed to developers is anyone's guess. For now, it remains what so many old factory towns know well: a question mark made of brick, a piece of the past that nobody quite knows what to do with.













šŸ­ Did You Work at Virjune Manufacturing Company?

Were you or a family member employed at this Waterbury factory — whether under Virjune Manufacturing, VCA, Metal Fabrication, Eyelet Design, Specialty Packaging, or Owens-Brockway? Do you have photographs of the cosmetic packaging, screws, or eyelets being made, or memories of the Waterville section when the red brick walls still had a roof overhead?

šŸ“© Share Your Memory or drop a comment below — full credit given to every contributor
⬇ Keep Reading — More Forgotten Factories
šŸ­ More Abandoned Connecticut History
From cosmetic packaging plants and organ factories to foundries and pin manufacturers — explore the lost manufacturing giants that once defined the Connecticut state.
šŸ­ Virjune Manufacturing Company once produced cosmetic packaging, screws, and eyelets in Waterbury's Waterville section — just south of the Scovill Manufacturing plant. The building has been vacant since at least 1989.




Source(s):




1. Larson, A. (2023, June 19). Waterbury applies for $9.1M grant to complete brownfield remediations. Hartford Business Journal. https://hartfordbusiness.com/article/waterbury-applies-for-91m-grant-to-complete-brownfield-remediations/

2. (1950) Sanborn Fire Insurance Map from Waterbury, New Haven County, Connecticut. Sanborn Map Company, - Feb 1950; Vol. 2. [Map] Retrieved from the Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/sanborn01192_008/

3. (1922) Sanborn Fire Insurance Map from Waterbury, New Haven County, Connecticut. Sanborn Map Company, Vol. 2. [Map] Retrieved from the Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/sanborn01192_006/

4. (1956) Sanborn Fire Insurance Map from Waterbury, New Haven County, Connecticut. Sanborn Map Company, - Republished 1956; Vol. 3. [Map] Retrieved from the Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/sanborn01192_011/

5. Oyanadel, J. A. (2024). Joe and Gloria An Immigrant's Story of Love: Love, Joy, Happiness, Beauty, Pleasures. Freedom! He Wants it All. (n.p.): Covenant Books, Incorporated.

6. Eyelet Design. (n.d.). Eyelet Design [Business listing]. Yahoo Local. Retrieved June 28, 2026, from https://local.yahoo.com/info-10614600-eyelet-design-waterbury/


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