Mattatuck Manufacturing Company

Mattatuck Mfg Co Screw Products Advertisement

If you stand at the corner of Southmayd Road and East Main Street in Waterbury today, you will not hear the clatter of heavy machinery. You will not hear the sharp blast of a factory whistle cutting through the afternoon air. Instead, you will see a senior center, an outpatient hospital annex, and a funeral home. It is a quiet corner of the city, dedicated to rest, healing, and memory.

Yet beneath the clean pavement and tidy lawns lies the ghost of an industrial giant.

For more than a century, this ground belonged to the Mattatuck Manufacturing Company, known simply to generations of locals as Mattaco.

Two Mills and Seven Houses

The story began on October 15, 1896, when the company was organized with Henry L. Wade as president, George E. Judd as treasurer, and George Tucker as secretary, on a capital of $225,000. That was a massive sum for the era. It raised two imposing four-story mill buildings, each measuring 150 by 44 feet, with mill construction throughout and fitted with a sprinkler system. The property ran to several acres, and alongside the plant the company built seven model houses for its workers.

Before long, the factory was operating day and night. Neighbors grew used to the constant, rhythmic hum of metal presses vibrating through the ground. Mattatuck made the small brass and wire items that quietly held everyday American life together. The 1918 county history lists them in one long breath: brass and wire goods, furniture nails, upholstery nails, spring bed fabrics, screw machine products, handcuffs, wire forms and shapes and novelties. If a shopkeeper rang up a sale on a cash register, or a child rolled a toy truck across the living room rug, chances are Mattatuck made the metal pieces inside.

Sanborn Fire Insurance Map, Waterbury, Vol. 3 — the 1922 edition, republished with paste-on corrections through 1956.

The Business of Restraint

They also mastered the business of restraint. Handcuffs sat right there in the company's official product list alongside the upholstery nails, and the patents back it up. In November 1907, William G. Eggleton of Waterbury was granted a patent for a shackle, assigned to the Mattatuck Mfg. Co. Three years earlier, Henry G. Judd had patented a handcuff of his own and Mattatuck built it; collectors still call that model the Judd. It is hard to look at the name and not notice that the company's first treasurer was George E. Judd.

There is a story that gets told about these cuffs, and I want to be straight about it because I believed it myself for a while. Antique Mattatuck restraints turn up for sale with Harry Houdini's name attached to them, sometimes right in the listing title. I went looking for the connection and could not find one anywhere. Not in the Houdini scholarship, which tracks his working restraints in obsessive detail and knows him for Bean Giants and Tower cuffs. Not in the Mattatuck Museum's own files on the company. Not in the collector literature. What I found instead was the name turning up in dealer copy, where it does exactly the work you would expect it to do to a price. It may still be true. I just cannot show you that it is, and I would rather say so than pass it along.

Boxed Hand & Leg Irons of Mattatuck Mfg Co Waterbury CT

Brakes, Cables and Cartridge Clips

The nails and the novelties are the nineteenth-century half of the story. What Mattaco spent most of the twentieth century doing was quieter and further under the hood. By the postwar decades the plant was turning out brakes, transmission cables and related automotive components, and coaster brakes for bicycles, which means a good number of Waterbury kids learned to skid to a stop on hardware made a few blocks from their own street.

When World War II broke out, the factory answered the call to arms. Workers quickly retooled their lines, shifting from decorative upholstery nails to cartridge clips for the Army's service rifles. At the height of the war, more than 500 employees turned out as many as three million clips every single week. Longtime residents still recall the 5 p.m. whistle that signaled the end of the day, sending hundreds of tired men and women out into the streets to head home to their families.

What Is Left

By the late twentieth century, the tide had turned. Rising operating costs and relentless foreign competition battered the Brass City. In 1992, after nearly a century of steady production, the plant shut down its operations for good.

The massive brick complex stood abandoned for a decade, slowly decaying under the elements. Around 2002, the buildings came down, and the real work began, because the land underneath was in no condition to build on. Property owner Gilbert Boutin partnered with the city, and more than $2.4 million in state grants went in alongside them. The cleanup ran roughly $6 million and took a full decade; the Environmental Protection Agency did not record remedy construction as complete on the nine-acre site until September 25, 2012.

In 2013, the site officially found its second act when the East End Senior Center opened its doors at 117 Southmayd Road. Saint Mary's Hospital took medical offices on the property, and Casey's Eastside Memorial funeral home took the rest.

The Mattatuck Museum downtown has nothing to do with the company. It started life in 1877 as the Mattatuck Historical Society, nineteen years before there was a Mattatuck Manufacturing Company, and both of them simply borrowed the Algonquian name for the land they stood on. The museum does hold the company's board minutes if you are interested.

There is an unexpected symmetry to how this corner of Waterbury evolved. Decades ago, Mattaco produced the metal springs people slept on, the toys children treasured, the brakes that stopped their bicycles, and the ammunition clips young soldiers carried overseas. It was an engine of vigor, labor, and youth. Today, that same soil provides care for citizens in the twilight of life. The machines have stopped, and the shift whistle has faded into memory, but the ground still belongs to the people who built it.

 Reader Records

 Did your family work at Mattaco?

Did someone you know punch out at that 5 p.m. whistle, or had a father or a grandmother who did. I would like to hear what the floor was actually like. The Houdini story: if anyone has a catalog, a company newsletter, a photograph, or an employee badge that settles either one, it would put to rest something that has been repeated for decades without a source.

⬇ Keep Reading

⚙️ More from the Brass City and beyond

Waterbury's other vanished factories, and a few places where the machines stopped the same way.

 Waterbury Button Company Another small-metal-goods giant a few streets over, lost to fire in 2023. ›  Former Anamet Manufacturing Complex Seventeen contaminated acres of Waterbury brass, mostly leveled by 2019. ›  Waterbury's Forgotten Factories: The Story of Bristol Babcock Instruments instead of nails, and the same slow ending. ›  Hurwood Manufacturing Company (United Pattern Co) A Bridgeport toolmaker's plant, now a hollow shell held up by struts. › ⚗ Exploring the Abandoned Aerosol Techniques Factory in Milford, CT (Photos) Another large Connecticut industrial site with a long contamination tail. ›  Inside the Abandoned R&S Strauss Auto Service Center (Photos) The far end of the parts chain Mattaco's brakes and cables fed into. ›

 The Mattatuck Manufacturing Company was organized in Waterbury, Connecticut on October 15, 1896 and made brass and wire goods, upholstery nails, handcuffs and later automotive brakes and transmission cables at 1981 East Main Street. The plant closed in 1992, the buildings came down around 2002, and after a decade-long cleanup finished in 2012 the nine-acre site reopened as a senior center, medical offices and a funeral home.

Source(s):

1. Pape, W. J. (Ed.). (1918). History of Waterbury and the Naugatuck Valley, Connecticut (Vol. 1, p. 299). The S. J. Clarke Publishing Company. https://archive.org/details/historyofwaterbu01pape
2. Eggleton, W. G. (1907, November 12). Shackle (U.S. Patent No. 870,871), assignor to the Mattatuck Mfg. Co. https://patents.google.com/patent/US870871A/en
3. Judd, H. G. (1904, August 2). Handcuff (U.S. Patent No. 766,263). https://patents.google.com/patent/US766263A/en
4. Pazniokas, M., & Rabe Thomas, J. (2019, June 10). Crumbling buildings are left uncounted. CT Mirror. https://ctmirror.org/2019/06/10/crumbling-buildings-are-left-uncounted/
5. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. (n.d.). Mattatuck Manufacturing Company, Waterbury, CT (RCRA ID CTD001165760). https://19january2021snapshot.epa.gov/hwcorrectiveactionsites/epa-rcra-id-ctd001165760_.html
6. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. (2022, May). Waterbury redevelopment economic profile. https://www.epa.gov/system/files/documents/2022-05/Waterbury%20Redevelopment%20Econ%20Profile_05232022_508.pdf
7. Puffer, M. (2019, June 3). One problem with empty, blighted buildings? Knowing how many there are. Hartford Business Journal. https://hartfordbusiness.com/article/one-problem-with-empty-blighted-buildings-knowing-how-many-there-are/
8. Sanborn Map Company. (1922). Sanborn fire insurance map from Waterbury, New Haven County, Connecticut (Vol. 3, republished 1956). Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/item/sanborn01192_011/
9. Electric car manufacturer backs out of move to state. (1994, July 29). Hartford Courant. https://www.courant.com/1994/07/29/electric-car-manufacturer-backs-out-of-move-to-state/
10. Mattatuck Museum. (n.d.). Waterbury manufacturing and business collection finding aid. https://www.mattmuseum.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/M005_SmallBusiness_FindingAid.pdf
11. Waterbury History Page. (n.d.). Here's another employee identification button/photo, this one from The Mattatuck Manufacturing Company [Post]. Facebook. Retrieved September 13, 2026, from https://www.facebook.com/100076875772143/posts/534179322487922/