Vernon: The Mill Town on the Hockanum
Near Hartford, Connecticut
Vernon, Connecticut was first settled by families from East Windsor in seventeen sixteen, carved from the town of Bolton when it was incorporated in eighteen oh eight. The community's defining chapter came with the Industrial Revolution. The Hockanum River, rushing through the town, offered abundant waterpower.
In the eighteen twenties a mill village called Rockville grew up around the Rock Mill, the first textile mill in the village. The success of that operation set off a textile boom. By the end of the nineteenth century, Rockville was a prosperous city of woolen mills incorporated within the Town of Vernon, and its name was synonymous with good American cloth.
The last mill closed in nineteen fifty-one, and by nineteen sixty-five the city and town governments had merged back into a single Town of Vernon. Today the brick mill buildings along the Hockanum survive as a reminder of the era when New England rivers ran not with fish but with looms.
