From Excelsior Needle Co. to Timken: The Rise and Fall of Torrington's Standard Plant

The Standard Plant and a Century of Making Things

It was a hot May week in 2023, and J and I were already sweating through our shirts before we even made it to the entrance. We turned into the driveway off North Elm Street and passed a large Caterpillar backhoe holding up the red, white, and blue at the top of the arm. Patriotic machinery. Only in Connecticut.

We moved toward the back of the complex with our eyes open, scanning for any sign of people or activity. We found cameras instead. A few of them, well-positioned across one of the buildings and up on an electrical pole, covering angles that made our original entry plan useless. We backed off, found a Plan B, and stepped into a dark room washed in tinted green light, then took the stairs down to ground level.

The former Standard Plant sits along North Elm Street at a sunken grade, one story, with another building rising over the roadway to the far right when you're standing in front of it from North Street. It's the kind of layout that takes a minute to read. We stood still and listened before we moved anywhere.

When we were satisfied it was quiet, we walked through an open door into one of the larger floor spaces and got to work.

The interior surprised me. Spacious, open, and relatively untouched. No machinery left behind, which was expected. No signs of scrapping either. But also, almost no graffiti in the sections we were able to cover that day. For a complex this size, sitting idle and accessible on the edge of a post-industrial New England city, that was genuinely unusual. The place had been left alone in a way that doesn't happen often.

Then we heard them.

Two kids, a boy and a girl, maybe middle school age or younger, wandering through the building like they owned it. Casual. Comfortable. Using 800,000 square feet of abandoned factory as their personal hangout spot. I wasn't angry at them, exactly. I was perturbed. Miffed. Annoyed in the specific way you get annoyed when someone else's bad decision becomes your problem.

They probably had no idea what they were standing in. A building that started by making sewing needles and ended up supplying components to industries that spanned the globe. A place that kept a thousand families employed for decades. They were just looking for somewhere to be on a hot afternoon, somewhere away from adults, and this was the biggest empty space in their neighborhood.

I get it. I just wish they'd picked somewhere else that day.

1924 Sanborn Map Survey

The Standard Plant is, in a quiet way, one of the more complete records of American industrial ambition in a single city block.

The story starts in 1866 with the Excelsior Needle Company, founded in Torrington to exploit a new manufacturing process called cold swaging, a method of shaping metal while it's cold to form needle points. It was a narrow business built on a clever process, and for a while it was enough. But by the 1890s, the company had already started expanding outward, adding latch needles for knitting machines, heavy hook needles for the shoe trade, and bicycle spokes through a subsidiary called the Torrington Swaging Company.

That subsidiary was renamed the Standard Spoke and Nipple Company in 1898, the same year Excelsior was absorbed into the newly formed Torrington Company of Maine, a holding company put together by executives connected to Kidder, Peabody and Company of Boston, Excelsior's majority shareholder. The needle business was fading in relevance, and the new structure reflected that reality. The Standard Company, as it came to be called, kept running under local management and kept growing.

In 1906, an independent factory went up on the north side of North Street: two one-story manufacturing buildings, each 365 feet long and 72 feet wide, designed by architect Charles S. Palmer and built by Torrington Building Company. Over the next two decades, the plant expanded in every direction, north, east, south, and west. By the late 1920s, the Standard Company's catalog had grown to include needles, bicycle spokes and nipples, handlebars, metal tubing, machine screws, carpet sweepers, piano hardware, and spark plugs. Then came ball bearings in the late 1920s, replaced by needle bearings in the 1940s, and it was the needle bearing business that would carry the company into the second half of the 20th century, eventually supporting a workforce of over 1,000 people at its peak.

After 1917, when the holding company was reorganized as the Torrington Company of Connecticut, the factory became known as the Standard Plant. It kept expanding through the 1960s, adding manufacturing, research, and development space as the business grew. In 1968, Ingersoll-Rand Corporation bought the Torrington Company, and the plant continued under that ownership into the early 2000s. By the time of that sale, the Torrington Company had become an international operation with facilities in England, Canada, Germany, Brazil, Italy, Portugal, and Japan.

Ingersoll-Rand shut down the needle business in 1980. By that point, it was still the largest employer in Torrington.

Timken Company, an Ohio-based bearings and alloy steel manufacturer, acquired the Torrington subsidiary in 2003 for $840 million, folding its automotive and industrial bearing products into Timken's existing lineup. Timken eventually stopped making bearings in Torrington in 2006. The remaining bearing plants were sold to JTEKT Corporation in 2009, the same year Torrington Business Park LLC picked up the nearly 800,000 square feet of former factory space from Timken. The last business operating out of the complex was Albea Corporation, a manufacturer of beauty and personal care packaging, keeping a limited operation going in a building that once made things for bicycles, shoes, pianos, and the engines of war.

In October 2023, a $4 million partial demolition and abatement project started clearing the site. It wrapped up in the summer of 2024. Industrial Realty Group, working with the City of Torrington and a $2 million brownfield remediation grant that helped with demolition costs, has since been positioning the property as a future manufacturing hub, with a possible $24 million innovation cluster grant from the state Department of Economic and Community Development potentially driving the next phase. Whether that vision materializes is a question Torrington has been asking itself about this block for its foreseeable future.

⚙️ Did You Work the Presses at the Standard Plant?

Whether you ran the needle swaging lines, worked the bearing presses during the Ingersoll-Rand years, or clocked in under Timken before the lights went out in 2006 — those memories belong somewhere other than a fading pay stub in a drawer. Photographs from the factory floor, shift cards, tooling samples, or even just a story about what Building 1 smelled like on a Monday morning: all of it matters. The demolition crews have already taken most of it. What's left lives with the people who were there.

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From Excelsior Needle Co. to Timken: The Rise and Fall of Torrington's Standard Plant

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