Monday, April 30, 2018

New England Pin Company, No. 5, "Yankee Ingenuity"



PHOTOGRAPHER’S JOURNAL: “Ingenuity,” an interesting word hovering between the ingenious, the ingenuous and the mad! Commonly ascribed to our Yankee ancestors of the late 18th and 19th centuries, Mark Twain gave it a distinctly Connecticut accent when he sent jack-of-all-trades Hank Morgan to King Arthur’s Court. 

Jack-of-all-trades hardly does justice to the wide-ranging endeavors of John Ireland Howe. Born in 1793 in Ridgefield, CT, he began studying medicine there; later graduated from the College of Physicians and Surgeons in NYC with honors; practiced medicine and was appointed resident physician at the New York Alms House. For fourteen years he held a respected place in New York’s medical community.

What wave of genius or demons carried Dr. Howe away from the practice of medicine to making pins in Birmingham, Connecticut? It was India rubber that first washed over him; experimenting with compounds he sought one that would make rubber stable. Then, at age 36, his passions surged, and he moved with his wife and children upstate, out of NYC, to the tiny village of Salem, NY, where he poured his family’s savings into a factory building of his own design to produce a rubber compound of his own formulation and patent. Later he mused on possibly being the first to try to make rubber and said, “I just didn’t happen to find the right substance.”

In the failed rubber factory in 1830 he remembered the inmates at the alms house and the tedious process by which many of them made a bit of a living making pins by hand; he also remembered a device he had seen in England designed to make pins.




Friday, April 27, 2018

New England Pin Company, No. 4 "Anatomy of a Pin Company"



PHOTOGRAPHER’S JOURNAL: The “magnificent plant of the New England Pin Company," built in Winsted between 1880 and 1905, consisted of five manufacturing blocks, of varying height, arranged as two arms around a long, narrow yard, the parallel arms traversed by two bridges and by the showcase, 1901, five-story, factory block (previously discussed) with the 100 foot frontage facing Bridge Street and the train station.

The New England Pin Company history has been well documented by the Connecticut Trust for Historic Preservation which reports that by the early 1890s the Winsted pin works had become the largest pin factory in the United States, employing 60 hands capable of producing 7,000,000 pins per day. The success allowed New England Pin to acquire smaller rivals, Diamond Pin, Empire Pin, Pyramid Pin and by 1905 more than double the work force and production in Winsted.

As the Trust dociuments explain: "The company’s product consisted of a wide variety of needlepointed pins. These ranged between one-half of an inch and four inches in length and included office, bank, shawl, book, blocking, and hair pins sold under such brands as ‘Crown,’ ‘Victoria,’ ‘No Plus Ultra,’ and many others.”

Before there were clips, pins held everything. Passing from room to room, block after block, winding the oddly contorted paths of shifting pipe-rail up and down winding stairways, floor after floor, avoiding the places where floors have gone soft, it’s impossible to find a pin or anything to do with pin making. And, in fact, in 1927 New England Pin merged with Star Pin and National Pin and moved operations downriver to Shelton, and it was woolen underwear, not pins, that began to be manufactured here until 1955 when all except the old pin buildings were carried off by the flood, and manufacturing ceased in these blocks and passages built for making pins. 


























Thursday, April 5, 2018

UPCOMING EVENTS




SLIDE-TALK
Saturday, April 7 at 4 PM — Cornwall Library, Cornwall, CT
Finding Brass Valley, A Place in Time that Has Almost Vanished


SLIDE-TALK
Monday, April 9 at 7:15 PM — Charter Oak Photographic Society
Elmwood Community Church
26 Newington Road, West Hartford
[Working Title] Work In Progress
(on photography & photographing industry Brass Valley)



RE-BROADCAST from Nutmeg TV
Wednesday, April 11 at 9 PM EDT/6 PM PDT
“Studio 911” on CPTV – Larry DaSilva’s Interviews Emery Roth 
re: Brass Valley: The Fall of an American Industry

Holyland from Benedict & Burnham