Naugatuck Green, Dec. 20

 

Education in Naugatuck (#4)

When the time came in 1901 for the town to replace Naugatuck's aging high school, the design was again given to the architectural firm of McKim, Mead & White, and an appropriately lofty site was chosen further up the hill and with a more commanding view over the Green below. It would open in 1905. By then MM&W had designed many of the buildings that give the Green its character. They were the preferred architects of railroad president and industrialist John Howard Whittemore who, advocating “City Beautiful,” had, over many years, paid to make Naugatuck a showplace of the movement.

The high school MM&W designed on the hillside site is nothing, if not disciplined — a granite, marble and brick, Ionic, 3-story Classical temple, restrained from any hint of wayward Beaux Arts eclecticism. It is a buff-colored temple fit for Athena and for the education of Naugatuck’s next generation. Carved above the marble of the entablature is a cartouche quoting Charles William Eliot, “The fruit of liberal education is not learning but the capacity and desire to learn — not knowledge but power.” It’s probably safe to assume Whittemore had considerable say in that choice.

Charles William Eliot was president of Harvard through the transformational years 1869 to 1909 and was a leader bringing profound reforms to American education at all levels. He raised public school graduation standards and broadened high school curricula to include teaching of the sciences and of foreign languages. Eliot served as president of the National Education Association and on a ten member national commission whose 1893 report influenced schools and school boards everywhere, beginning reforms leading to the creation of the first “junior high schools.”

“…not knowledge but power.” I’m still wondering exactly how to understand that.

Salem School, by William Rutherford Mead (#3)

 

McKim, Mead & White were celebrity architects serving America’s elite. William Rutherford Mead was the cousin of President Rutherford B. Hayes, he was involved with the American Academy in Rome, was a man of substance, wealth and contacts. Mead, described as "authoritative" and "quiet," was known as, “the center of the office,” hiring and firing, overseeing the jobs and production that are even more the task of architects than flashy design. Mead is credited with relatively few original designs, but the central building facing onto the Naugatuck Town Green, the Salem School, was primarily Mead's design. 

 

That a school was central to the new City Beautiful to be built, and at the top of the green, looking down the Green's central axis toward the commercial center of town suggests the importance the creators of Naugatuck and the architects placed on education.

Planning the City Beautiful with McKim, Mead & White (2)

The 1893 Chicago World’s Fair was transformational for the town of Naugatuck. However, it began long before the fair had begun, in November, 1891, McKim, Mead & White had commissions in the town. Among them to design a new school on the hill above town and to design a formal town green below the school, between the Episcopal and Congregational churches where a stream from the hillside flowed east toward the river across a level plateau that had always been an informal green. The first town meeting had been held on that green almost a half century earlier, and a Civil War monument had been erected there in 1888. 

 

At the center of the formal Green, in an age before automobiles, MM&W, under the direction of William Rutherford Mead, would design a water fountain to bring cold, fresh drinking water to those who passed. Architecturally, the fountain established a formal axis from the head of Maple Street in the east, across the center of the level square that formed the Green, and up the hill, climaxing in the symmetry of the proposed Salem School. This core of Naugatuck’s future City Beautiful cityscape would be in place by 1895. Over the next quarter century McKim, Mead & White would play a major role in designing many of the buildings that surround the Naugatuck Green, the only green in Connecticut designed entirely by an architectural firm, truly a product of the City Beautiful Movement.

Naugatuck City Beautiful 1 — Henry Bacon's Train Station

Naugatuck is the next town south of Waterbury along the Naugatuck River’s path to the Housatonic. It’s small size and history as the corporate center of the American rubber industry made Naugatuck a showplace for architecture and small town planning that resulted from the City Beautiful Movement. By 1910, for travelers who got off the train there, the town's gateway was a new train station designed by, architect, Henry Bacon who was then also at work on the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC.

Henry Bacon had worked earlier for McKim, Mead & White, was mentored closely by Charles McKim and was his personal representative at the 1889, Paris Exposition and the, architecturally transformative, 1893, Columbian Exposition in Chicago. The Naugatuck Station's style has been described as “Spanish Colonial” and “Italian Villa,” though my own sense is that it is eclectic and original.  

(Note: The entry projection on the front is a recent addition)

Ghostly Letters on the Power House Wall

When Charles Benedict looked out from his “cottage," high on the hill north of Waterbury Green, he might often have looked to this spot below him where the Naugatuck River flows between the brass factories of Holmes, Booth & Haydens on this side of the river and the factories of Benedict & Burnham, across the bridge. Not so much competitors as conspirators, the two brass companies had divvied up the market and brought wealth to Waterbury. After WW1 they would all be part of a combined operation known as American Brass Company, and the entity once known as Benedict & Burnham ceased to exist. However, on the side of the old Benedict & Burnham power house, until the day this past summer, 2022, when the power house was demolished, you could still read the forgotten name, "Benedict & Burnham,” painted large in ghostly letters on the power house wall, though the company that went by that name hadn’t existed for more than 100 years.

 

 

 

 

Carrie Welton's Revenge

 

They say Carrie Welton, daughter of brass company partner, Joseph Welton, rebelled against a succession of private schools to which she was sent, but was known for her love of animals. She would have been 21 in 1863 when the family moved into Rose Hill, where she kept cats, dogs, rabbits and a black stallion named Knight of the Woods. She and Knight became known for galloping through town and frightening Waterbury pedestrians. When Carrie died she left the much of her estate to the ASPCA and the rest for the creation of a fountain, "for people and horses," and with a bronze statue of Knight at the head of the Waterbury Green.
 

Rose Hill Overlook

An earlier post discussed Wm. H. Scovill of Scovill Brass who once owned this house (http://rothphotos.blogspot.com/2022/11/union-station-from-cast-iron-gate-to.htm), once the finest in Waterbury. Style is the outer form of spirit and it has always seemed to me that Rose Hill might well have emerged out of the pages of a Hawthorn short story. Perhaps part of that comes from its apparent stubborn indifference to the changes happening all around it and to the untended hillside hump on which it sits and from which it overlooks the city. Carrie Welton’s time in the house adds a plot line: https://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/carrie-welton.