Windsor Locks: The Canal That Named a Town
Near Hartford, Connecticut
Windsor Locks owes its name, and its existence, to a stretch of dangerous river. The Connecticut River at Enfield Falls dropped too fast for safe navigation, stranding cargo boats trying to reach the industrial towns upstream. In eighteen twenty-seven, a company of investors hired laborers to dig a canal bypassing the rapids.
The canal opened in eighteen twenty-nine, and engineers built a set of locks to control the water level and allow vessels to safely move between the canal and the river. The community that grew around those locks came to be called Windsor Locks, and when the town incorporated in eighteen fifty-four, it kept the name the infrastructure had given it. Mills and manufacturing followed the canal.
That bend in the river is the head of navigation, the farthest point seagoing vessels can reach on the Connecticut. The Dexter company, founded in seventeen sixty-seven, was the oldest corporation listed on the New York Stock Exchange until two thousand, and it is part of the town's history. Bradley opened as a military base in nineteen forty and to civilian flights in nineteen forty-seven, and it covers about a third of the town, alongside the New England Air Museum.
Hamilton Standard opened an aircraft propeller plant here in nineteen fifty-two. And in nineteen sixty-five, the local Little League team won the world championship, beating a team from Stoney Creek, Ontario, three to one. Today, Bradley International Airport occupies the flat land nearby, and most travelers rushing off the runway have no idea the town's name is a literal description of canal hardware that once made this bend in the river passable.
