Danbury, Connecticut: Hat Capital of the World

Danbury once made more hats than any other city on earth. The story of how it rose to that title, and how it fell from it, is one of the stranger industrial arcs in American history.

It began, by legend, with a shoe. In seventeen eighty, a local entrepreneur named Zadoc Benedict supposedly plugged a hole in his shoe with rabbit fur and noticed that over time the fur compressed into something like felt. Whether or not the story is true, Benedict did open the first hat factory on Main Street that year, and the idea spread fast. By eighteen twenty there were twenty-eight hat factories in Danbury. By eighteen eighty-seven, thirty factories were turning out five million hats a year. The city's motto, Danbury Crowns Them All, was not metaphorical.

The hats were made from the fur of beavers and rabbits, a process that used mercury nitrate to treat the pelts. Mercury vapors filled the factory floors and slowly poisoned the workers. Hatters developed tremors, memory loss, and erratic behavior, a condition so common it gave the English language the phrase mad as a hatter, years before Lewis Carroll's character made it famous. The damage was well documented by the eighteen fifties, and largely ignored by manufacturers for another hundred years.

Danbury produced the hats that topped the heads of presidents, robber barons, and ordinary working men across the country. It was also home, briefly, to P. T. Barnum's early career, the showman ran a newspaper here before moving to New York, and later to composer Charles Ives, who grew up in a family of bandmasters and wrote some of the most dissonant, radical American music of the early twentieth century.

By nineteen twenty-three, labor disputes and changing fashions had cut the factories to six. The last Danbury hat factory closed in nineteen eighty-seven, the same decade American men effectively stopped wearing hats altogether. What remains is the nickname: Hat City.