Ball & Socket Manufacturing Co. | From Civil War Buttons to an Arts Complex

This one stings a little. Not every location hands you a story worth telling and then slams the door before you can photograph it, but the Ball & Socket factory had other plans for J and me that day. The cold was the first thing I remember. A sharp Connecticut chill that had absolutely no interest in our ambitions. We worked our way into the inner courtyard, feeling reasonably optimistic, and then hit a wall literally. Locked doors on every side. No entry points that weren't either sealed or watched. The only building we managed to get inside looked less like a historic factory and more like a very long parking garage that had given up on itself.

Even the boiler house was off the table. We circled, debated, and eventually made the call that every explorer has to make when a site is still secured and possibly still monitored: we walked. Some days you document. Some days the building wins. We never went back, and before we got a second crack at it, word came down that the complex was being handed off to something called the BASA arts project, sometime around 2022. That was that.

The real gut-punch came later, while I was deep in the research for this write-up. I found out that Building 1 had buttons embedded in the floor a detail that echoes almost exactly what I'd seen at the Warnaco Corset Factory, where curved needles were supposedly embedded in the rotting floors. Two factories, two different trades, the same strange impulse to immortalize the work in the very ground the workers stood on. I missed that detail by about twenty minutes and one locked door.

If you want to see what the interior looked like before the renovation crews moved in, there are photographs available; check John McDonald's post in the Connecticut Old Churches Houses Bridges Mills Facebook Group. And if you're anywhere near Cheshire, do yourself a favor and swing by the Ball & Socket Arts Complex. Spend some money on Sweet Claude's ice cream. Take an art class. Watch a show. It's genuinely rare for one of these old factories to get a second life that's actually alive; most of them sit in legal limbo, get stripped for copper, and quietly catch fire. This one didn't.

Brass, Buttons, and the Long Road to Snaps

Twenty-four local investors put their money into Cheshire Manufacturing Co. in 1850. The pitch was simple enough: buy sheet brass in narrow rolls, run it through a series of presses, and turn out stamped-metal goods. Mostly buttons, though combs and plateware rounded out the catalog. By 1870, the workforce had settled into a hierarchy that tells you everything about what factory life looked like in that era: 15 men in supervisory and toolmaking roles, 25 women, and 20 children handling most of the production. Six power presses and five stamps cut the blanks and embossed the designs. The buttons themselves came in three pieces: a back, a front, and a wire-eye for attaching to the garment. Assembly required a separate bank of 120-foot presses. A 35-horsepower steam engine ran the whole operation.

Cheshire Manufacturing didn't limit itself to sheet metal. Glass, fabric, and vegetable ivory, also sold under the name tagua, the seed of a South American palm, and it was a major button materials in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries precisely because it machines and take dye like ivory; all found their way into the product line over the years. These weren't cheap commodity buttons. The company was supplying buttons for United States military uniforms by the time the Civil War broke out, and that relationship would hold for over a century.

In 1901, the company merged with Ball and Socket Fastener Co. out of New Hampshire to form Ball and Socket Manufacturing Co. The name said everything about where the business was headed: two-piece metal closures, the kind that snap shut with a satisfying click. Today you'd call them snaps. In the early twentieth century they were an engineering novelty, and the company bet the building on them literally. Between 1907 and 1917, an entire new campus went up: lacquer and paint buildings, a two-story tumbling and plating facility, office space, storage, packing rooms, and an extension dedicated entirely to the eyelet presses that produced snap fasteners. Those progressive-die presses took flat stock and, across six or more sequential operations, blanked and formed each piece without ever letting it leave the machine. It was the kind of process that sounds unremarkable until you think about the scale: thousands of fasteners per hour, day after day, year after year.

The machinery that drove the expansion read like a who's-who of Connecticut manufacturing: eight presses from E. J. Manville Co. of Waterbury, six from Waterbury's own Draher Machine Co., multiple Waterbury-Farrel eyelet machines, and a dozen Baird presses. When Ball and Socket Manufacturing finally shut down in 1994, those machines almost certainly went to auction. A hundred years of snap-fastener production, sold off in lots.

Three Artists and a Factory Nobody Else Wanted

Seventeen years of vacancy, and then something unexpected: in 2011, three local artists, Ilona Somogyi, Jeffrey Guimond, and Kevin Daly, pooled their resources and bought the complex outright. They called their organization Ball & Socket Arts, and their plan was the kind of thing that sounds obvious in retrospect but requires an almost irrational amount of conviction to actually execute. Transform a decommissioned button factory into a live arts and entertainment destination: gallery space, performance venues, classrooms, retail, dining. In Cheshire. On a former industrial site with all the infrastructure challenges that implies.

The first tangible result for the public showed up in the summer of 2022, when Sweet Claude's Ice Cream opened on the main floor of Building 2. The second floor now houses Artsplace, a Cheshire town agency running art classes for all ages. Out back, a new parking area is being tied directly into the Farmington Canal Heritage Trail, effectively connecting the complex to a regional greenway that stretches for miles. The buildings at the rear of the site are slated to become a taproom and a multi-bay open-air market structure think farmers market, weekend vendors, that kind of thing.

None of this happened because a developer wrote a check. The ongoing renovation has been driven by the Ball & Socket Arts nonprofit, local officials, and volunteers the messy, slow, community-dependent kind of project that doesn't get announced at a press conference and doesn't finish on schedule. That's also exactly why it tends to stick. It is genuinely unusual to watch every last corner of a former factory get repurposed into something the neighborhood can actually use. Most of these buildings don't get that ending.

 

🪡 Did You Make the Snaps That Held America Together?

If your family punched in at Ball & Socket — whether you ran the Baird presses, sorted buttons on the assembly floor, or worked through the 1907 expansion buildings — those stories deserve to be somewhere other than a cardboard box in someone's attic. Paycheck stubs, shift schedules, factory floor photographs, or just a memory of what the place sounded like when all the presses were running: the BASA complex is writing the factory's next chapter right now. Let's make sure the first one isn't forgotten.

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Ball & Socket Manufacturing Co. produced snap fasteners and military buttons in Cheshire, CT from 1901 until closing in 1994. The site is now the Ball & Socket Arts (BASA) complex.

Source(s): 

1. O'Shaughnessy, T. (2025, May 27). Cheshire's Ball & Socket Arts denied $4.5 million grant for cleanup of former factory complex. CT Insider. https://www.ctinsider.com/waterbury/article/cheshire-ball-and-socket-arts-epa-grant-neh-doge-20338835.php

2. Ball & Socket Arts turns factory into gallery. (2024, March 19). New Haven Independent. https://www.newhavenindependent.org/2024/03/19/ball_socket_arts_blazes_trail/

3. WTNH. (2025, February 13). Connecticut Families: Ball & Socket Arts combines historic preservation, arts programming & tourism. https://www.wtnh.com/on-air/connecticut-families/connecticut-families-ball-socket-arts-combines-historic-preservation-arts-programming-tourism/

4. Hartford Business Journal. (2023, January 20). Cheshire's Ball & Socket Arts complex gets federal, state funding. https://hartfordbusiness.com/article/cheshires-ball-socket-arts-complex-gets-federal-state-funding