Danbury's Hat City: Main Street and the Industry That Built It

The street running through this part of Danbury has been the center of a city's commercial life since sixteen eighty-four, when the first settlers founded the town on a ridge above the Still River. The buildings that remain along Main Street today, Georgian storefronts, Greek Revival banks, Italianate commercial blocks, and Beaux-Arts civic structures, are a layered record of nearly three centuries of growth, most of it driven by a single product: hats.

Danbury's hat industry began in the seventeen eighties and nineties, when small workshops started producing felt hats from local beaver and rabbit fur. By eighteen hundred the city was turning out twenty thousand hats a year. The industry grew with the city and the city grew with the industry. By the turn of the twentieth century, thirty-five hat factories employed five thousand workers, and Danbury was producing roughly a quarter of all the finished hats sold in the United States. The nickname Hat City was not boosterism. It was accurate.

The wealth from hatting built Main Street. Banks financed the mills. Merchants supplied them. The institutional buildings, the churches, the courthouse, the commercial blocks, reflect the prosperity of a company town that happened to make an article nearly every American wore. The Main Street Historic District, listed on the National Register of Historic Places in nineteen eighty-three, encompasses one hundred and thirty-two properties spanning the late eighteenth through the early twentieth century, representing the full arc of that growth.

There is a darker thread in the hat industry's story. Hatters worked for years with mercury nitrate, used to treat animal fur during the felting process. Mercury vapor accumulated in the poorly ventilated workshops, causing tremors, mood disorders, memory loss, and speech problems in workers exposed over many years. The phrase mad as a hatter, made famous by Lewis Carroll's character, described a real occupational condition that afflicted workers right here in shops like these.

The last Danbury hat factory closed in nineteen eighty-seven, done in by changing fashion and overseas competition. Main Street outlasted the industry that built it.