Collinsville: Where the World Got Its Axes
Near Hartford, Connecticut
The village you are passing through has one of the stranger claims in American industrial history: for much of the nineteenth century, it supplied the world with axes.
In eighteen twenty-six, three men, Samuel Collins, his brother David, and their cousin William Wells, pooled resources and leased a stretch of the Farmington River here in what was then South Canton, Connecticut. Water power turned their grinding wheels; local iron from Watkinson and Company fed their forges. Within a few years they were producing something new: the first ready-to-use, fully finished axes manufactured in the United States. Before Collins opened, American buyers either waited for a blacksmith to hand-forge a single blade or purchased rough imports from Britain and ground them themselves. Collins changed that.
Growth was swift enough that the village took the family name. By the eighteen forties the company had expanded its product line to more than one thousand three hundred types of edge tools, and it turned an unexpected corner into the global machete trade. Somewhere around eighteen forty-five, Collins began producing machetes for export to Central and South America, eventually supplying roughly eighty percent of the world market. The word for a machete in much of Latin America became simply a Collins, whatever the actual manufacturer. During the Civil War the company shifted to bayonets and military picks; Admiral Peary brought Collins tools to the Arctic; the United States military purchased over one million Collins machetes during World War Two.
At the time of Samuel Collins's death in eighteen seventy-one, the company had produced more than fifteen million axes and posted annual sales of over one million dollars. The factory ran until nineteen sixty-six, when Mann Edge Tool of Pennsylvania absorbed it.
Today the old brick mill buildings along the Farmington River still stand, repurposed as restaurants and shops. The village retains the grid of worker housing and factory structures that made it a classic New England mill town. Few places on Route Two Oh Two carry the reach this quiet stretch once had, from the logging camps of New England to the cane fields of Brazil.
