Killingly, Connecticut: Cotton Capital of the State

In the eighteen thirties, Killingly was the state's largest producer of cotton goods. Rivers here had long been harnessed to power textile mills. The railroad arrived and transformed the village of Danielson from a mill center into a commercial hub for the surrounding countryside.

Later waves of manufacturing included the Powdrell and Alexander curtain factories, which made the town an important producer of window curtains by the nineteen thirties. The brick mill complexes along the Quinebaug River survive as the physical record of a town that ran on water power for more than a century.