Winsted's Union Pin Company: Highland Lake and Pins Still in the Soil

Photo courtesy of the Winchester Tax Office

Pins in the Brook: The Last Ruins of the Union Pin Company

J and I came at it through the trees. No path, just tall standing trees and the kind of undergrowth that swats at your shins and grabs your laces, until the canopy thinned and we found what was left.

A turbine, tall and rusted, rising out of the woods beside a brook in Winsted, Connecticut. A small generator sat on top of it, also rusted, also still. Beside that, set back from the tree line and facing the residential houses across Lake Street, a sealed and boarded building held its ground. It was August 2019, midday, the kind of heat that slows everything down. We photographed the turbine carefully, then picked our way downstream along the slippery rocks of the brook that fed toward the Mad River past Boyd Street.

What J never mentioned, and what I never thought to look for, was the hydropower outlet tucked behind the thick trees just off the path we'd taken. And neither of us ever tried to get a look inside that last standing structure, which partially sheltered the mill race beneath it. We were standing right next to a piece of the building's working history and walked past it.

The mill race was only exposed when that structure was demolished in March 2026. By then, there was nothing left to see in person. There rarely is, by the time you realize what you missed.

Inside the interior of the turbine generator.

The site at the top of Lake Street has been in continuous industrial use since the mid-1800s, passing through the hands of a tannery, a cutlery manufacturer, and several other concerns before the Union Pin Company arrived and made it famous for something very small.

The Dudley Tannery occupied the land first, sitting on the outlet of Highland Lake. Around 1856, Beardsley and Alvord, makers of pocket cutlery, took over the property and replaced the old buildings with new ones, eventually creating the Empire Knife Company, which operated from 1859 through 1908. Other manufacturers followed across different portions of the site: B. J. Harrison Son Company making folding chairs, a hardwood turning factory, the Winsted Optical Company producing spectacle frames, and the Britelite Lamp Company turning out metal lamps. The land between West Lake and Boyd Street to the north has always been put to use.

Union Pin Company was established in Torrington by founders Peter Allison and James Kelly, starting in the cellar of Kelly's home. The company moved to Winsted in 1913, taking over the former Beardsley and Alvord space. Winsted itself is a town that carries its geography in its name: the word is a compression of Winchester and Barkhamsted, the two towns it sits between. It was, in its time, one of Connecticut's serious manufacturing centers, and the pin trade was central to that identity.

What Union Pin made was simple: stainless steel common pins for the clothing industry, safety pins, and badges. The pin machinery was designed in-house. But the scale of the operation was anything but small. Workers on the floor fastened pins to paper cards, rolled them into tight wheels, and labeled them for shipment. Their Trupoint brand became the pin of choice for leading American shirtmakers, including Manhattan, Arrow, and Van Heusen. The same pins showed up at Singer Stores, W. T. Grant, J. C. Penney, and F. W. Woolworth. By 1934, the company had established itself as the world's leading producer of stainless steel pins for the apparel industry, a position it held for decades.

It was not alone in the trade. In 1919, Connecticut pin makers as a group produced 81 percent of all common pins in the United States, a concentration of industry that included Howe Manufacturing Company, Brown and Elton, the United States Pin Company in Seymour, Star Pin Company in Shelton, the Wyoming Pin Company right there in Winsted, Sterling Pin in Derby, Jewell Pin in Hartford, Pyramid Pin in New Haven, and H. Twitchell and Son in Naugatuck. The state had cornered the market on something that held the country's clothing together, literally.

What powered it all was water.

Union Pin Company controlled the water rights at the head of Highland Lake and decided, essentially unilaterally, how much water it drew down to run its turbines. The lake is ringed with year-round residences and seasonal cottages. When the company opened its gates to generate electricity for production, the lake level dropped enough that waterfront residents had to moor their boats farther out in deeper water and wade or row a dinghy to reach them. The company held riparian rights and had no legal obligation to accommodate the complaints, a situation that produced ongoing friction between the factory and the people whose recreation depended on the same water the turbines consumed.

Below the factory, up to six dams serviced downstream mills along the brook, including the John W. Roe Saw Mill, Winsted Hardware Mfg Co., Benjamin Richards & Co., B. J. Harrison Chair Factory, and The Vulcan Mfg Co. The whole stretch of water had been engineered across generations, each operator drawing from the same source and negotiating, formally or not, with everyone else who depended on it.

The 1955 hurricanes complicated things further. Carol and Diane hit the Naugatuck and Farmington valleys in succession, dumping a reported 25 inches of rain on the Winsted area alone and causing severe flood damage to mills throughout the town. Among the consequences was a scattering of Union Pin's inventory into the brook itself. Neighborhood children collected the pins from the rocks and the water alongside the property, which is the kind of industrial accident that leaves a specific and very odd memory for an entire generation of local kids.

Photo courtesy of the National Archives at Boston

By the early 1970s, Union Pin was one of only two factories in Connecticut still generating electricity from water power. That distinction, which might have sounded like heritage, was in practice a sign of obsolescence. The machinery was aging, the building was no longer functional, and the industry itself was under pressure from every direction. As Professor Edward T. Howe of Siena College, an economist who studied the American pin trade, put it: imports from Czechoslovakia, West Germany, England, and eventually Asian nations undercut domestic producers; the decline of American shirt manufacturing reduced demand for the pins used to fasten them; plastic tags replaced pins for clothing; paper clips and staples replaced pins for fastening paper. Safety pin demand dropped as diaper fasteners changed. All of it together, according to Howe, gave manufacturers less and less reason to invest in plants that were already expensive to run.

In 1967, George Light sold the company to Kirsch Company of Sturgis, Michigan. By 1977, the Winsted property was for sale. In 1980, the town of Winchester bought the land and its water rights. Union Pin had already relocated to the New Hartford Industrial Park. The Houston-based Cooper Industries eventually acquired the plant and held it until 1995, when weak domestic sales had idled the operation since 1992, and Cooper folded everything into its Beacon Falls facility.

A rusted turbine that once powered operations at Union Pin Co.

According to CT Insider, Ernest Wolff proposed building a 60-room Holiday Inn on the site in 1999. Mechanics' liens for surveying and asbestos removal were filed against the property. The original structure was partially demolished around October 2000. The building housing the mill race survived all of that and stood for another quarter century, boarded and forgotten, until March 2026.

When demolition workers finally cleared it, they found pins in the soil. Decades after the last shift, the ground was still giving them back.

The site is a parking lot now, used as overflow storage for boaters at the Marina at Highland Lake. Heavy machinery was reported leveling the ground around April 2025, though work likely began earlier, in the dead of the preceding winter. The hydropower channel that ran beneath the last standing building has been either covered or the flow of water diverted. Highland Lake, which the company once drained to run its turbines and which lake residents once petitioned and complained about for years, now serves primarily as the backdrop for a marina. The water rights that Winchester bought in 1980 are administered by an ad hoc Water Level Committee, which is the kind of institutional outcome that a turbine in the woods probably didn't see coming.

I tried to learn more through a FOIA request to the Town of Winchester. The fees exceeded my thirty-dollar budget, plus the hourly rate of whoever would have been tasked with pulling the records. Some questions stay open for practical reasons.

What I know is what I saw in August 2019: a rusted turbine standing in the trees, a boarded building, a brook running over slippery rocks toward the Mad River. And what I missed, right there beside me, that I didn't know to look for until it was gone.

📌 Did You Work at the Union Pin Company — or Grow Up on Highland Lake?

Whether you fastened Trupoint pins to paper cards on the production floor, remember draining arguments with the lake association over water rights, or simply grew up in Winsted watching the turbine spin at the top of Lake Street — those details are gone from the ground now. The mill race was covered in early 2026, and the site is a marina boat parking lot. What survives lives with the people who were there: shift photographs, pay stubs, memories of the 1955 flood damage, or even pins your family pulled from the brook as kids. Reach out before that disappears too.

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Winsted's Union Pin Company: Highland Lake and Pins Still in the Soil

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