Meriden: How a Connecticut Town Became the Silver City of the World
Near New Haven, Connecticut
For most of the nineteenth century, if you ate a Sunday dinner in the United States and your silverware wasn't actually silver, there was a very good chance it came from Meriden, Connecticut.
Meriden's transformation from a farming village into the self-proclaimed Silver City of the world began in the eighteen forties with a metal called Britannia ware. Britannia was an alloy of tin, antimony, and copper, cheaper than silver but harder than pewter, with a shinier finish. English craftsmen had perfected it, and Connecticut entrepreneurs figured out how to manufacture it at scale. Two former peddlers, Horace and Dennis Wilcox, formed the Meriden Britannia Company in eighteen fifty-two, starting as distributors and quickly becoming manufacturers. By eighteen sixty, they employed more than three hundred workers and were plating Britannia ware with silver, producing a product that looked like sterling at a fraction of the price.
The model was wildly successful, and Meriden became a magnet for silver-related industry. Company after company set up shops in the central Connecticut hills: Rogers Brothers, who developed a popular silver-plating process; the Meriden Silver Plate Company; the Wilcox Silver Plate Company; and dozens more. By the eighteen nineties, companies in and around Meriden were producing roughly seventy percent of all silverware and silver-plated goods made in the United States.
On November nineteenth, eighteen ninety-eight, these competitors consolidated into a single giant: the International Silver Company, headquartered in Meriden. The merger immediately absorbed most of the region's silver businesses and set the company on a path to becoming the largest manufacturer of silver products in the world. By the nineteen twenties, International Silver was grossing more than twenty million dollars a year.
The factories are mostly quiet now, converted or demolished. But Meriden's nickname, the Silver City, stuck, a reminder of the time when the formal table settings of a nation passed through this valley on their way to American dining rooms.
