The Yankee Peddler, Brass, and the Naugatuck Valley

There is a type in American folklore who is half-admired and half-suspected: the Yankee peddler, the lean Connecticut man with a pack on his back or a tin wagon on a rutted road, selling clocks, nutmeg, tin pots, buttons, and notions to frontier families from New Hampshire to Georgia. The stereotype was not entirely kind, Southern hospitality laws sometimes targeted Connecticut peddlers specifically, and the phrase wooden nutmeg became shorthand for Yankee trickery. Connecticut even adopted the Nutmeg State as an informal nickname, though whether in pride or self-deprecation remains an open question.

But behind the folklore was a real and remarkable economic phenomenon. Connecticut in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was short on farmland and long on ingenuity. The state's rocky glaciated soils could not support large-scale agriculture.

What Connecticut had instead was fast-moving rivers, access to iron ore, and a cultural inheritance of precision craftsmanship from its English Puritan settlers. Those rivers powered mills. Those mills made things.

The Naugatuck Valley, running south from Torrington through Waterbury and Derby to Ansonia, became the brass capital of the world in the nineteenth century. Waterbury alone housed dozens of brass rolling mills and button factories. The industry owed its start partly to Abel Porter and later to the Scovill brothers, who by the eighteen thirties were running one of the most sophisticated metal-fabricating operations in North America.

Waterbury clocks, Waterbury buttons, Waterbury brass plumbing fittings, these were in parlors and kitchens and trousers across the continent. The clock industry, particularly in Bristol and Plymouth, produced inexpensive wooden-movement clocks that the peddlers sold by the wagonload. Connecticut made things small enough to carry and precise enough to last.

That combination was the state's genius for most of two centuries.