Even with a flashlight, it took a few seconds for our eyes to penetrate the murky darkness that extended like a mine shaft into a sequence of factory sheds indifferently spotted with the light from broken roof monitors. Variously, passages connected to similar sheds left and right, some glowing, others black as a crypt and all empty down to the walls and vacant. What went on here?
I’ve learned the first of the sheds was built in 1906 to house a spinoff of the Excelsior Needle Company (see: New England Pin Co. No.2). These buildings would serve the newly formed Standard Spoke and Nipple Company. Motor cars were still gadgets, but bicycles had become practical and popular, high-speed transportation requiring strong legs but neither hay nor barn. The new sheds would have been filled with machine tools strung together by belts and ropes to a hungry steam engine and the workers who knew how to use these to make products that wound include not just needles, bicycle pedals and handlebars, but metal tubing, machine screws, carpet sweepers, piano hardware, ball bearings, eventually spark plugs as well as bicycle spokes and nipples. At its peak the Torrington Company’s Standard Plant, as it would be known after 1917, would employ more than 1000 workers, tho nobody has worked here for 2 or 3 decades.
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