Wallingford, Connecticut

Wallingford, Connecticut was incorporated in sixteen seventy from land purchased from the Quinnipiac people, making it one of the older towns in the state. For most of its history it was a farming and small-manufacturing community, but in the mid-nineteenth century it became the center of the American silver-plating industry. The International Silver Company, formed in nearby Meriden in eighteen ninety-eight from a merger of smaller Connecticut silverware firms, eventually became the largest silverware company in the world.

Wallingford-made flatware appeared on ocean liners, in White House state dinners, and on the tables of American middle-class households for a century. The factories are mostly gone today, but the industry defined the town's identity for generations, and a strong institutional sense of craft and quality in Connecticut manufacturing traces part of its lineage to the silver shops along Wallingford's Mill River.