The Sewing Machine Capital

Before Bridgeport was known for anything else, it was known for sewing machines. In eighteen fifty-six, a company called Wheeler and Wilson moved its operations here from Watertown, Connecticut, drawn by the city's rail connections and a large factory building on the downtown waterfront. Wheeler and Wilson made sewing machines, and they made them better and faster than almost anyone else in the world.

The partnership that created the company was built on a classic New England arrangement. Allen B. Wilson was a journeyman from upstate New York who had conceived, mostly independently, the idea of a mechanical sewing machine in eighteen forty-seven, not knowing that others had already invented it. He kept improving his design anyway, and by eighteen fifty-two he had patents on two critical innovations: a rotating hook mechanism and a four-motion cloth feed, the combination that made his machine fast and reliable. Nathaniel Wheeler was the money and the management. Together, they built a company that by eighteen fifty-nine was selling more sewing machines in the United States than anyone else.

At its peak, the Wheeler and Wilson factory in Bridgeport occupied a sprawling complex near what is now the South End. Machines built here were exported to Europe, South America, and Australia. The company sold nearly two million machines over the course of its existence. Workers flooded into Bridgeport from Ireland, Germany, Hungary, and the Caribbean to staff the factory floors.

The company was eventually absorbed by the Singer Corporation around nineteen hundred and five, and Singer phased out the Wheeler and Wilson designs. But the workers stayed, and the infrastructure stayed, and Bridgeport kept building things. The factory district that Wheeler and Wilson established became the industrial core of a city that would, by nineteen ten, be the largest manufacturing center in Connecticut.