Inside Danbury’s Abandoned Amphenol Factory Before the Fire
Inside the Factory: A 2023 Visit
In 2023, I parked halfway between the building and the parking lot and did my lap around the premises looking for the entrance, and lo and behold, I found it off the rip. Seeing my pathway and weary, clear-eyed vision, I almost bailed because the residential houses opposite were so close to it. Feeling bold and not wanting to waste the gas that brought me here, I summoned my male vigor and trod through without being caught or seen. I ducked into the nearest door out of the sight lines of the nearby law enforcement parking lot and entered the darkened ground floor. Feeling a celebratory success, I began my documentation with an earnest breath. After calming my heart rate down, I went upstairs and was met by a fairly decent office space, devoid of office furniture but with several piles of clothing scattered across the ground. Feeling perturbed and wary that I had walked into someone's living space and deathly worried about bed bugs and cockroaches, I turned with so much force I thought I had popped my hip bone.
The Sawtooth Building and Building No. 6
I travelled further into the belly of the oldest building on the property; the saw-tooth roof weaving mill building came before the expansion across the bend of the slender Middle River stream north of the weaving mill building. As I crossed part of the parking lot and hugged my frame as close to the buildings, I surveyed the usual busted and partially disassembled vehicles sitting in front of what looked like a garage and entered the No. 6 factory building.
Inside was a wet, mucky mess, but the long factory floor led me to the former dye house and dry room, each containing an old lathe and an old Ingersoll-Rand air compressor, rusted and seized, never to compress again. Moving around in the darkness, I saw in the corner of my eye the sloping elevation that led to the powerhouse that contained two huge boilers, rusted with peeling paint. The roof was in tatters as nature covered the floor in small knee-high tree saplings. This powerhouse was powering green leaves now. Having completed all the buildings on site, I exited rather clumsily and returned to the road, as I melted away to the nearest highway exit.
Silk Hats on the Middle River: A. E. Tweedy and the Sawtooth Mill
Whilst many Danbury-ites may know it as the old Amphenol factory, a manufacturer of electrical connectors, that sits across from the local police headquarters, its origins point to a former silk hat manufacturer called Tweedy Silk Mills Inc. Its forebear was A. E. Tweedy/A. E. Tweedy Silk Works, a manufacturer of silk hat braids, silk tips (linings), and bands, and in an October 1909 Sanborn Map, we can see that A. E. Tweedy had already built the distinct sawtooth building across the Middle River (Padanaram Brook). The first floor was for storage, and the second floor was for the weaving department.
A two-floor plan that carried through until the last tenant, Amphenol Corporation. In a 1929 Sanborn Map, we see Tweedy Silk Mills Inc. take over and expand the property from the sawtooth building by building a powerhouse, a dye house, and a larger factory building. What is now the Danbury Police Department HQ and parking lot was once Asher Papish, manufacturers of hatters' furs, and some smaller residential houses in 1929; the last recorded companies after were Risdon Mfg Co., manufacturers of lipstick cases, and Bridgeport Fabrics Inc., manufacturers of hat bands.
Danbury's Hat Dynasty: Two Centuries of Fur, Water, and Labor
For more than two centuries, Danbury, Connecticut, was known as the hat center of the nation. Danbury had all the necessary inputs for hat making: fuel, water, labor, and fur. Danbury's early families laid the groundwork for the most prominent hat manufacturers. Their names to this day still exist in street names and mills across Danbury and Connecticut. Merritt, White, Meeker, Benedict, Seely, Rockwell, Mallory (Mallory Hats), Taylor, Hoyt, Babcock, Boughton, Brewer, Dibble, Gregory, Rickles, Stire, Wildman, and Tweedy.
The 1840s brought the arrival in Danbury of the first forming machine, put to experimental use under the auspices of A. E. Tweedy & Co. These crude forming machines increased productivity and output. Butler & Tweedy was established in 1887 and produced hatters' trimmings, bindings, braids, and silk bands. It was run by Arthur E. Tweedy, an industrialist and former president and vice president of City National Bank & Trust. The Tweedy family was involved in numerous hat businesses across town until it concentrated its hat interests into the Tweedy Silk Mill on East Franklin Street. Quite similar to the Mallory family, founded by Ezra Mallory and run by his son, and later his grandsons and great-grandsons, into the largest hat factory in Danbury called Mallory Hats on Rose Hill Avenue until they sold their entire interests to a familiar name you may know: John B. Stetson Company in 1946.
From Silk Braids to Military Computers: Bunker-Ramo Corporation
Bunker-Ramo Corporation was founded by George M. Bunker and Simon Ramo in 1964, jointly owned by Martin-Marietta and Thompson Ramo Wooldridge (TRW) "to pool their unprofitable computer and electronics operations into a new entity.", according to Douglas Ott. The resulting company, Bunker-Ramo, was based in Trumbull, Connecticut. It became a manufacturer of military electronic devices and digital computers, including the BR-133, given the military designation AN/UYK-3, a legacy mainframe computer used by the Royal Navy and U.S. Navy during the 1970s and 80s.
It was a supplier of video display terminals to the finance industry as well. In 1968, the Amphenol Corporation acquired Bunker-Ramo despite Bunker-Ramo beginning earlier than Amphenol and having larger business revenues. Corporate offices moved to Oak Brook, Ill thereafter. The combined company peaked at number 338 on the Fortune 500 list in 1969. In 1981, Bunker-Ramo was then acquired by Allied Corporation d/b/a Allied Company or Allied Signal, formerly Allied Chemical Corporation, for $358 million. In 1987, Bunker-Ramo was acquired by LPL Investment Group for $430 million, controlling electrical connectors and coaxial cable production under a private investment vehicle structure. It is now part of the industrial behemoth Honeywell Group.
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The Machine That Built Nasdaq
In February 1971, the firm unveiled the first version of the National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotations system, NASDAQ. The very first version of the Nasdaq stock market index. For more history and a deeper investigation, check out Douglas Ott's "The Story of Amphenol: 1932-1958" six-part series and subscribe to his Substack.
The Bunker-Ramo Corporation's patent 3,368,028 formed an essential market device that enabled an essential part of the company's Telequote system, according to the NYTimes, "in which a desk instrument like a small TV set enables a broker to have current quotations, market trends, and other information displayed before him on a screen. In other applications, the invention helps hotel patrons to get reservations and airline travelers to trace their baggage. It links a large number of remote stations, such as desk consoles or tele-typewriters, with a computer in which information is stored, but introduces an intermediate unit called a message composer. This unit saves time for the computer, a machine that can receive and transmit data in a fraction of a second. The composer, or buffer, accepts a query from a remote station, a character at a time, and when it is complete, turns it over to the computer. The computer's response, such as the latest sale of General Motors stock or the current market averages, is fed to the composer, which sends it to the inquiring station. Here the information can be printed out or, if it is to be displayed on a tube, is continuously transmitted as long as it is wanted." The patent was used in more than 12,000 Telequote III instruments since 1964 and the Telequote 70.
The Bombsight Factory Hidden in Plain Sight: Barden Corporation
If you have been keeping up with the head-spinning mergers and acquisitions of Bunker-Ramo, The Barden Corporation, founded in 1942 to produce ball bearings for the Norden bombsight and other precision parts, remained here at one point, based on a 1959 Sanborn map, despite no evidence of its existence on the city's property card, until a new factory was built at 200 Park Avenue in 1957. However, that may have been due to national security during World War II or a misplaced property card or deed book entry. They used 23 E Franklin St as their address despite using the same buildings. I cannot confirm that, but Carl L. Norden, a Dutch mechanical engineer, and Theodore Barth, an American engineer, created Carl L. Norden Inc. to mass-produce bombsights from Barth's Manhattan apartment, from Norden's designs all the way in Zurich for the Army and Navy.
The Pearl Harbor attack increased production exponentially to 2000 bombsights per month at different plants during the war across different states. The plants were named after them in various naming schemes. Barden Corporation in Danbury, CT, Lukas-Harold Corporation in Indianapolis, and Norden Laboratories in White Plains, NY. They were all heavily guarded, and the activities of Carl L. Norden Inc. were kept secret. According to CT Mills, "bombsight production ended in September 1945, and Carl L. Norden Inc. was dissolved in 1949, although the subsidiaries remained active to this day." Barden Corporation still produces specialized ball bearings and other products for machine tools, ships, textile machinery, cameras, submarines, planes, dental drills, X-ray equipment, and even computers for machining, transportation, and medical industries.
Contamination, Condemnation, and a City Left Holding the Bag
The crumbling factory now stands fenced off on a 2.5-acre lot behind the Danbury Police Department's headquarters in a mostly residential neighborhood. The city owns both that property and an adjacent former parking lot at 72-80 Maple St. The condemned property was seized by the city in September 2019 from its former owners, Aberdeen Development LLC, which owed $1.1 million in unpaid property taxes at the time. The city paid Aberdeen Development $20,000 for 72-80 Maple Avenue. In the same year, according to news reports, the city of Danbury was scheduled to demolish the 100,000-square-foot factory complex following a multi-year legal fight to take control of the contaminated property, but it never did. I could not ascertain why they did not.
Mayor Mark Boughton's administration wanted to clean up the 2 1/2-acre property and install basketball courts. That idea never became a slam dunk and never traveled any further. However, in March 2022, former state Rep. Ken Gucker proposed building a new elementary school, but the Department of Energy and Environmental Protection (DEEP) told Danbury lawmakers the site is too contaminated to be inhabited or used for recreational purposes because the grounds are heavily contaminated by mercury, arsenic, and other polluting industrial chemicals. The city eventually invested $164 million to build a new west side high school and middle school on 30 acres off Kenosia Avenue, just west of Danbury Fair Mall, according to CT Post.
It is no surprise the City sought to sell the property in a contentious debate to take it off its books due to the costs associated with holding unmarketable property. When the city took control of the old Mallory Hat Factory on Rose Hill Ave, a $1.3 million state environmental grant funded the cleanup, and the Women's Center of Greater Danbury then used it to build a residential facility for women and children.
Up in Smoke: The October 2026 Fire
Sadly, on October 5, 2026, one of the old Amphenol factory buildings burned down in a two-hour blaze as 50 firefighters attacked the 100,000-square-foot abandoned factory around 12.20 am as they used drones to aid their attack in subduing the blaze. However, this is not the first time fire has been a hazard at this location. As recently as September, a fire was put under control by firefighters, and as far back as 2015, a mattress fire started by a squatter sounded a three-alarm fire.
Currently, an investigation is underway, but if you are in the know or have explored this former Middle River (Padanaram Brook) factory, you would have noticed homeless activity in a certain room on the second floor. However, we will let the authorities make their conclusion on the cause of this early morning blaze. As to what the city might do with the smoldering factory ruins is up in smoke, no pun intended.
The East Franklin Street complex began as A. E. Tweedy's sawtooth silk mill, grew into Tweedy Silk Mills Inc., housed Barden Corporation, and ended as the Amphenol factory behind Danbury Police headquarters. The city was scheduled to demolish it in 2019 but never did, and I could not find out why. One of its buildings burned down on October 5, 2026. If you worked there, or have photographs, records or memories of the buildings, I would like to hear from you. Full credit given to all contributors.
Source(s):
- (1892) Sanborn Fire Insurance Map from Danbury, Fairfield County, Connecticut. Sanborn Map Company, Nov. [Map]. Retrieved from the Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/sanborn01113_003/
- (1904) Sanborn Fire Insurance Map from Danbury, Fairfield County, Connecticut. Sanborn Map Company, Feb. [Map] Retrieved from the Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/sanborn01113_005/
- (1909) Sanborn Fire Insurance Map from Danbury, Fairfield County, Connecticut. Sanborn Map Company, Oct. [Map] Retrieved from the Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/sanborn01113_006/
- (1929) Sanborn Fire Insurance Map from Danbury, Fairfield County, Connecticut. Sanborn Map Company. [Map] Retrieved from the Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/sanborn01113_008/
- (1950) Sanborn Fire Insurance Map from Danbury, Fairfield County, Connecticut. Sanborn Map Company, 1929 - Mar. [Map] Retrieved from the Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/sanborn01113_009/
- Jones, S. V. (1968, February 10). Silent sound method sticks metal to plastic; 20,000-cycle device joins materials in 3 seconds: Wide variety of ideas covered by patents issued during week. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/1968/02/10/archives/silent-sound-method-sticks-metal-to-plastic-20000cycle-device-joins.html
- Amphenol and Bunker-Ramo form into a new company. (1968, June 4). The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/1968/06/04/archives/amphenol-and-bunkerramo-form-into-a-new-company.html
- Amphenol RF Division, Bunker Ramo Corporation. (1975, February 6). Introducing the ALC-5 [Advertisement]. Electronics.
- Collins, S. A. (1985). Two centuries of hat making: Danbury's famous trade (Historic Booklet Series, No. 5). Danbury Tricentennial Committee.
- Langlois, M. (2011, September 8). Padanaram Brook, unseen mostly, ran amuck through downtown Danbury. Patch. https://patch.com/connecticut/danbury/padanaram-brook-unseen-mostly-ran-amuck-through-downt3a1461ed19
- NBC Connecticut. (2015, August 19). Squatter likely started 3-alarm fire in former Danbury factory. https://www.nbcconnecticut.com/news/local/squatter-likely-stared-fire-in-vacant-t-danbury-building-officials/47284/
- Tribert, R. (2016, December). Barden Corp. Historic Mills of Connecticut, Preservation Connecticut. https://connecticutmills.org/find/details/barden-corp
- Ryser, R. (2019, September 22). Taking a bite out of Danbury blight. Newstimes. https://www.newstimes.com/local/article/Taking-a-bite-out-of-Danbury-blight-14456710.php
- Carey, E. (2019, September 23). Danbury's decrepit Amphenol eyesore behind police station to be demolished. I95 Rock. https://i95rock.com/danburys-decrepit-amphenol-eyesore-behind-police-station-to-be-demolished/
- Ryser, R. (2022, March 4). Danbury agrees to seek the highest bidder for its 'absolutely horrendous' warehouse site. CT Post. https://www.ctpost.com/news/article/Danbury-agrees-to-seek-the-highest-bidder-for-its-16975302.php
- Carey, E. (2022, March 4). Decrepit abandoned industrial site in Danbury up for sale to highest bidder. I95 Rock. https://i95rock.com/decrepit-abandoned-industrial-site-in-danbury-up-for-sale-to-highest-bidder/
- Gagne, M. (2023, December 11). Danbury gets $200,000 DECD grant to study Amphenol blight. The News-Times. https://www.newstimes.com/local/article/danbury-200-000-decd-grant-study-amphenol-blight-18566233.php
- Ott, D. (2025, July 20). The story of Amphenol: 1932-1958. Andvari's Substack. https://andvari.substack.com/p/the-story-of-amphenol-1932-1958
- Evans, H. (2026, September 24). Fire breaks out at vacant manufacturing building in Danbury. Patch. https://patch.com/connecticut/danbury/fire-breaks-out-vacant-manufacturing-building-danbury
- Diaz, J. (2026, October 5). Fire at abandoned Danbury factory under investigation. WTNH. https://www.wtnh.com/news/connecticut/fairfield/fire-at-abandoned-danbury-factory-under-investigation/
- Bunker Ramo Corporation. (n.d.). Military Wiki. Retrieved October 13, 2026, from https://military-history.fandom.com/wiki/Bunker_Ramo_Corporation
- Obituary for Arthur E. Twe. (n.d.). Record-Journal. Retrieved October 14, 2026, from https://www.newspapers.com/article/record-journal-obituary-for-arthur-e-twe/112950676/
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