Digital Ink'd

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...

The Box Man's Legacy: How H. J. Mills Went from Match Boxes to a Parking Lot There is a community parking lot in downtown Bristol, Connecticut, that does not look like much. Cars pull in, cars pull out. The lot sits in the middle of the business district, unremarkable by any measure, crossed underneath by a culverted stream called Ivy Brook that runs east to west beneath the pavement. For twenty-three years before the asphalt went down, this ground held a burned ruin, then a vacant lot, then weeds so thick and deep that homeless people took shelter in them. Before any of that, for 120 years, it held a factory. The man who built that factory also ran a newspaper, served in the state legislature, belonged to the Masons, the Knights of Pythias, the Bristol Lodge of Elks, and the Hartford Gun Club, and died in 1933, leaving behind a house that still stands on Summer Street. His name was Herbert J. Mills. His company made cardboard boxes. And al...

There is a daycare operating now at 318 North Main Street in Southington, Connecticut. Next door is an ice cream shop. Down the row sit a jeweler and a medical office, arranged in a clean commercial plaza that could pass for any small-town strip in New England. What is underneath all of it is a different story. Before the plaza, there was a fire. Before the fire, there was a corporation that dissolved and left its contamination for the town to deal with. Before that, there was a vat of nickel-chrome solution laced with cyanide that cracked and leaked onto the concrete floor, and nobody around to take legal responsibility for the 500 gallons of it spreading across the building. And before any of that, for nearly a century, there was Beaton and Corbin. It seems Beaton & Corbin started out manufacturing knives before producing plumbing products. The property on North Main Street has been in ...

  On paper, 275 Bay Road should have been an easy sell. Warren County put the 1.09-acre parcel on the market through a public tax auction, hired a professional firm, and set what seemed like a modest floor price. In reality, the numbers told a very different story. The Board of Supervisors brought in Auctions International Inc. to handle the sale, setting a minimum bid of 68,700 dollars. The auction company would collect a 6 percent fee from the winning bidder. If the county turned down all offers, it would still owe the firm a flat $2,000 fee for its work. The property itself had been vacant for years. The building that once stood there was demolished in early spring of 2021 after decades of decline. Before that, the state Department of Environmental Conservation had taken a hard look at the site. Inspectors found only small quantities of trimethylbenzene, a colorless liquid with a sharp odor that is used to produce dyes, pharmaceuticals, and antioxidants, as well as a solvent in ...

Sometimes, in the quiet race to document the past, you’re just a week too late. That was the story with the old garment factory on Lloyd Street. I had just pinned its location in MyMaps for a trip to Pennsylvania, a promising brick shell I hoped to explore, when the news broke. It was gone. In its place was a fresh scar on the landscape, a void where a piece of the city’s story once stood. The demolition was swift, a decisive act funded by half a million dollars in county and state money, taking with it a handful of long-abandoned row homes that had been its neighbors in decay. This wasn't just any building. The building was originally built as a meat packing facility for Armour & Company in the early 1900s, and was later acquired by Milton Sorin and his United Wiping Cloth Company. For decades, it was the United Wiping Cloth Company, a place of work and purpose. Over the years, it had supplied rags to many varied manufacturing concerns all over the eastern United States, until...

Photo Courtesy of 43 North Real Estate The story of this site begins with a simple set of numbers. It covers 1.63 acres. At its center stands a four-story, 80,000 square foot building. Around it sit a parking lot, two driveways, and a small strip of grass along the north side. To anyone driving by, it might look like an ordinary old industrial property, the kind you see in many towns. What you cannot see from the street is the long environmental story written into the ground beneath it. For years, this property was used in ways that left behind more than just history. It became a brownfield, a place where past industrial activity left pollution in the soil and groundwater. Today, the land has undergone a cleanup, focused on two serious “hot spots” of contamination tied to a chemical called trichloroethene, or TCE. TCE is a common industrial solvent. It is often used to remove grease from metal parts, a routine step in many factories and repair shops. The problem starts when TCE is spil...