Author Archives: Laura Smith

About Laura Smith

Archivist

The Thermos Company in Connecticut

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Thermos Company workers, ca. 1940s

The vacuum flask, better known by the trade name Thermos, is fairly ubiquitous in the United States.  Virtually every household has a few, to keep food at the desired temperature, be it hot or cold.  The vacuum flask was invented in 1892 by Scottish inventor Sir James DeWar and its popularity quickly spread.

William Walker, founder of the American Thermos Bottle Company, established a Thermos plant in Brooklyn, New York, in 1907, but moved in 1913 to Norwich, Connecticut, where it became the city’s largest employer.  After World War II the company built another plant in nearby Taftville, Connecticut, and became known as Thermos Company.

In 1969 Thermos was bought by Household International and in the 1980s production moved to Illinois.  The collection held in Archives & Special Collections are not the company records but a collection of publications, photographs, company newsletters, and annual reports, gathered by the company’s workers to celebrate their pride in the company that they, and many of their family members, worked for for much of the 20th century.

You can read more about the company and the collection in its finding aid, at https://archivessearch.lib.uconn.edu/repositories/2/resources/701

The 1906 Wire Gang Crew of the Southern New England Telephone Company

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1906 work crew, Southern New England Telephone Company

The records of the Southern New England Telephone Company held in Archives & Special Collections have a historical depth that archivists and historians alike find amazing.  The collection not only can give a comprehensive overview of the company itself, but the materials can also speak to other histories — of Connecticut, of the beginnings of the telephone industry, of the introduction of women into the storied profession of telephone operator (“Number, please”), and many many others.

Established as the District Telephone Company of New Haven, the company opened on January 28, 1878, with a mere twenty-one subscribers.  It was the world’s first commercial telephone exchange, the brainchild of Civil War veteran  George Coy along with Herrick Frost and Walter Lewis.  By the time these men distributed the world’s first telephone directory three weeks later the company had 50 subscribers.  The company took the name of the Southern New England Telephone Company in October 1882 and lasted until it was taken over by SBC Communications in 1998.  After that it merged with AT&T.

Wire Gang journal, 1906, Southern New England Telephone Company Records

There are many extraordinary documents and photographs in the collection and it was hard to choose among them to highlight for today’s blog.  On top is the photograph of a 1906 work crew in Guilford, Connecticut.  Note the goat standing between the legs of the man on the right and the dog with the man up on the pole.  Above are two pages from a 1906 Work Book of Wire Gang No. 31 out of Ridgefield, Connecticut, with details of work done on the line in August 23-29.

For more information about the SNET records see the finding aid at https://archivessearch.lib.uconn.edu/repositories/2/resources/207.

A Celebration of Conn and Twain

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Ken Noll and Jerry Krasser reading from “3000 Years Among the Microbes” by Mark Twain, December 6, 2010

You might have noticed that I posted last week about an exhibit a INTD class constructed about Mark Twain and Connecticut microbiologist H.W. Conn.  The exhibit depicts the work of the two men, particularly about how Conn’s work on microbes was influential for Twain’s essay “3000 Years Among the Microbes,” written in 1905.  The exhibit is currently up in the Plaza Alcove in Homer Babbidge Library until December 17.

Yesterday, in the library’s Class of ’47 room, was a celebration of the exhibit, where Professor Ken Noll acknowledged the work of the freshmen honors students of the class.  A wonderful bonus to the program was a reading of Twain’s essay, by Prof. Noll and Emeritus Professor of Dramatic Arts Jerry Krasser.

The local NPR affiliate interviewed Prof. Noll prior to the event and taped the reading, and information about the event was aired this morning on WNPR out of Hartford.

Mark Twain and the Science of Dr. Conn

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Prof. Ken Noll (far left) and students with their exhibit "Mark Twain and Herbert W. Conn"

As curators we often work with undergraduates on their class projects, and I recently had the opportunity to work with Professor Kenneth Noll of the Molecular and Cell Biology department in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.  Prof. Noll devised a project for a INTD class he taught this semester, “Mark Twain and Herbert W. Conn: Science in Literature and Society in Late 19th Century Connecticut.”  We all know who Mark Twain is but who is Conn?  H.W. Conn was a very prominent scientist at Wesleyan University in the late 1800s/early 1900s, and although he was not a faculty member at what then the Connecticut Agricultural College (now known as UConn), he was the driving force in establishing the Storrs Agricultural Experiment Station.  Prof. Noll’s objective for the class was to have the students create an exhibit that describes Conn’s work as the Connecticut state microbiologist, juxtaposing it to Mark Twain’s 1905 essay, “3000 Years Among the Microbes,” which deflates human beings’ inflated sense of importance. 

Ken Noll and the exhibit, in the Plaza Alcove at Homer Babbidge Library

The class, all of them freshmen honors students, was split into three groups to research Conn and Twain, as well as the science behind Conn’s work, particularly his 1893 Chicago World’s Fair exhibit on dairy microbiology.  The students used many materials in Archives & Special Collections, including photographs from the University Archives, Storrs Agricultural Experiment Station catalogs, and maps, and made a field trip to the Connecticut Science Center.

 The result is an exhibit now up in the Plaza Alcove in Homer Babbidge Library until December 17. 

On December 6, at 11:00a.m., there will be a celebration of the exhibit that will feature a reading from Twain’s story by retired Prof. of Dramatic Arts Jerry Krasser and Prof. Noll.  The public is invited to the celebration, in the Class of ’47 room in Homer Babbidge Library

Laura Smith, Curator for Business, Railroad and Labor Collections

An Archival Thanksgiving

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The Cranberry, photographed by Don Ball, Jr.

Sometimes when it’s my turn to write something for the blog, and nothing immediately comes to mind, I will then think of an anniversary that can be celebrated, or a holiday that is approaching, and how the archival material can illustrate that event.  With Thanksgiving fast approaching I thought “what’s in the archive that touches on this holiday?”.  One of the best ways to explore the archives is by using the search box to the finding aids, available on our collection management system at https://archivessearch.lib.uconn.edu/.  I decided to have some fun and put in search terms related to Thanksgiving.  Here’s what I got:

Thanksgiving: 14 hits, mostly from political and Children’s literature collections, including a Thanksgiving themed popcorn tin in the Tomie dePaola collection.

Thanks: 5 hits, mostly related to expressions of gratitude from the creators of the collections.

Turkey: 23 hits!  Wow!  But it won’t surprise you to read that the vast majority of these hits are on references to the country, not the bird, in political collections.

Gobble: only 2 hits, including the title “Gobble Gang Poems” by the poet Ed Sanders.

Gobbler: 1 hit, in the Ted and Betsy Lewin Papers (a children’s illustrators collection)

Stuffed: 7 hits! but mostly referring to stuffed toys, stuffed animals, and stuffed furniture (huh?  What kind of collection is THAT?  It’s a railroad collection, if you can believe it, a description of a photograph of the interior of a plush railroad car).

Football: Lots of hits there — 55 of them!  Most of them from the University Archives collections, references to UConn football, of course.

Cranberry: 4 hits, including the photograph that you see above of The Cranberry, a diesel locomotive owned by the New Haven Railroad, taken by photographer Don Ball, Jr.

Squash: 5 hits, three of them referring to the game, one to the vegetable, and one to a Leaf-Footed Squash Bug.

There were 5 hits for “pumpkin” but NONE for “pumpkin pie”.  That is just so wrong.  There’s always room for pumpkin pie in the archive, right?

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

Let’s talk toilet paper

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Ah, we’ve stooped to this.  The talk always turns to potty humor, doesn’t it? 

As odd as it sounds, we here at Archives & Special Collections have toilet paper in one of our archival collections. That’s right — ARCHIVAL toilet paper.  In a business collection, if you can believe it.   Let me explain…

Cardboard cover for toilet paper manufactured by C.H. Dexter Company of Windsor Locks, Connecticut

The Dexter Corporation began in 1767 as a small, family-operated mill on land in Windsor Locks, Connecticut. Originally a saw and grist mill, the business added a paper mill and began marketing specialty papers in the mid-nineteenth century.  In its third generation of family ownership, under the direction of Charles Haskell Dexter, the company established itself as the C. H. Dexter Co. and developed products for a well-defined market of papers and tissues.  Their Star Mills Medicated Manila Tissue was the first commercially-manufactured tissue. Together with his son, Edwin Dexter, and his son-in-law, H. R. Coffin, C.H. Dexter moved the company into the twentieth century as C. H. Dexter and Sons, Co. In 1914 the company was incorporated and was headed by A. D. Coffin, the son of H. R. Coffin.

The years of the depression in the 1930s saw the company’s further evolution with the development of the Long Fiber Papers, and through mergers and divestments.  In addition to its specialty tissues and paper covers, the company began producing tea bags and meat casings.

By the mid-twentieth century, having established the quality of its specialized papers, C. H. Dexter and Sons, Inc., began production of industrial finishes and laminates. The company renamed itself the Dexter Corporation in 1966 to reflect its expansion and development.

In 1999-2000, when a hostile takeover threatened to displace over 200 years of operations, the Dexter Corporation dismantled, leaving only a trail of toilet paper in its wake (not really. I was kidding about that).

Shown here is a cardboard cover for a package of toilet tissue, circa 1896.  For more information about the C.H. Dexter Company, and to see the cover and the toilet paper up close and personal, look at the finding aid at https://archivessearch.lib.uconn.edu/repositories/2/resources/343 and come view it in the reading room.  I’ll warn you, though — toilet paper from 1896 is NOT as soft as a baby’s bottom.  Not by a long shot.

The End of a Railroad Line

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New York, Westchester & Boston Railway station at Port Chester, New York, 1930

On August 21, 1937, service ceased on the New York, Westchester & Boston Railway line, which despite its reference to Boston actually ran just from lower Manhattan to Port Chester, New York.  It was incorporated in 1872 (as the New York, Westchester & Boston Railroad) but the charter lay dormant until 1900, when investors formed the New York & Westchester and reorganized in 1904 as the NYW&B Railway.  The line was in direct competition with the omnipresent New York, New Haven & Hartford Railroad (better known as the New Haven Railroad), which controlled almost all railroad, trolley and steamship traffic in southern New England into New York City from 1872 to 1969, so the New Haven Railroad bought up all of the fledgling company’s stock and made it into a showcase of elegant stations, bridges and viaducts.  Unfortunately such opulence was unsustainable and the line was never able to turn a profit.  It closed in 1937, its property was auctioned off in 1942, and its locomotives and cars were scattered to the four winds.

A fantastic website giving the full history of this line is at http://nywbry.com/index.php.

Archives & Special Collections has Board of Directors minutes and financial records of the NYW&B Ry., as part of the  New York, New Haven & Hartford Records, an enormous collection of administrative, real estate, financial and legal records of the railroad and its predecessor companies.

The “Poetess” of the Brotherhood of Railroad Trainmen, Lodge #201

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Louise Gaffney Flannigan, born in 1867 and died in 1949, lived her whole life in New Haven, Connecticut.  As the sister and wife of men who worked for the New Haven Railroad, she wrote flowery poems as odes to the courage and fortitude of railroad trainmen, and for good reason.  Working for the railroad in the late 1800s was dangerous — this mode of transportation was still very new and laws regulating the railroads to ensure the safety of the workers were few.  Many of the poems Louise wrote were memorials to the men who died on the job.  Sadly, even her husband, Frank Flannigan, died in 1915 when he was hit by a train.

The Louise Gaffney Flannigan Papers, part of the Railroad History Archives, is a very unique collection, quite unlike the typical railroad collection of timetables, track maps and photographs of locomotives and stations.  Louise’s papers consist of her poems and writings, almost all about her admiration of her beloved trainmen and her despair when one falls while on duty. The poems tell us a lot about Louise herself, about her resilience and her humor.  Despite her constant fear that another man will die while working for the railroad, she had a real respect for the trains, their power and their beauty. 

Shown here is the first stanza of “A Brakeman’s Death,” undated but it must have been written before 1889. Louise  writes “Whenever I pass near the railroad track, and see the trains pass by so fast, I love to wave to the jolly brakeman, seated on the cartops, as one by one they pass, Their eyes are ever on the alert, To see each bridge and dodge down low, They run quickly also to their brakes, Over cars covered with ice and snow.”

Hard work, indeed.

For more information about the Louise Gaffney Flannigan Papers, see the finding at https://archivessearch.lib.uconn.edu/repositories/2/resources/530

Copies of the items in her collection can be found in the UConn Library digital repository, at http://hdl.handle.net/11134/20002:20070066

The Cheney Brothers Silk Manufacturing Company Records — Paris fashion straight from eastern Connecticut

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The Cheney Brothers Silk Manufacturing Company Records is not a new collection — we’ve had it in the archive since 1984 — but it is a solid collection of extraordinary historical materials that draws a steady line of researchers from genealogists and textile historians to UConn’s undergraduate and graduate students and secondary school students.  The collections provides strong materials documenting this Manchester, Connecticut, company’s rise, in 1838 as the Mount Nebo Silk Company founded by six Cheney brothers, to its status as a leading producer of silk in the 1880s, to its peak in the 1920s when it produced silk for fashionable French garments, and then follows its decline after World War II (when it produced parachute material for the war effort) to its sale in the 1950s to J.P. Stevens & Company.  The Cheney family was renowned for their paternalistic attitude to their workers and for providing housing, schools, and recreation facilities for its workers.  An extraordinary component in the collection is a large set of employee cards from 1900 to 1940 where details of each worker — his or her country of origin, languages spoken and read, levels of education — are available, making that an amazing resource for ethnic history research.

This image from a 1929 brochure shows how the company marketed its fashionable fabrics.  Tres chic!

You can find more images from the Cheney records, of the Paris fashions, in our digital repository at https://archives.lib.uconn.edu/islandora/object/20002%3A860650148#page/1/mode/2up

Wishing you a Happy Thanksgiving…with employee magazines

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A New Haven Railroad dining car employee serves Thanksgiving dinner to a passenger.

The employee magazine, or “house organ,” for such large businesses as the New Haven Railroad and the Southern New England Telephone Company, allowed company employees a means to communicate, to find out about recent happenings with the company, and to share such information as recent marriages, births, retirements, and deaths involving other workers.  At Thanksgiving time, as we see from the employee magazines for the railroad (on the left) and SNET (below) which are held in the archives, the magazines show how the employees enjoyed the feasts of the season.  We see a New Haven Railroad dining car employee serve a passenger (well, probably not a real passenger, probaby a model posing as a passenger or employee) her Thanksgiving dinner, and an employee in the New London office cafeteria is served turkey.
This latter photo had the following caption:  “Susan Reidy can hardly wait to get back to a table in New London Cafeteria to down this delicious turkey dinner.  Bird was cooked by Catherine Tooker (carving), while Cafeteria Supervisor Mildred Berg looks on.

A SNET employee is served Thanksgiving dinner at the New London office cafeteria.

Tucked inside is Grace Murray’s famous dressing.  See recipe on Page 27.”

Of course we wouldn’t leave you hanging and not give you the recipe.  Happy Thanksgiving!

46th Anniversary of the indictment of Patrick B. McGinnis

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Patrick B. McGinnis in the cab of a New Haven Railroad locomotive, 1954

Patrick B. McGinnis in the cab of a New Haven Railroad locomotive, 1954

August 14, 2009, was the 46th anniversary of the indictment by a Federal grand jury in Boston, Massachusetts, of former New Haven Railroad president Patrick B. McGinnis on a charge of obtaining personal profit from a deal involving the sale of railroad cars while he was president of the Boston & Maine Railroad. McGinnis was president of the New Haven Railroad from April 1, 1954, to January 18, 1956, and was controversial from the outset. He won the presidency through a proxy fight, ousting President Frederick “Buck” Dumaine, Jr., and during his tenure he was regarded as controversial for deferring maintenance and buying expensive new motive power at a time when the New Haven Railroad was experiencing diminishing ridership and the effects of extensive floods in August 1955, in which hundreds of miles of track were damaged. Immediately upon being ousted as President of the NHRR McGinnis became President of the Boston & Maine Railroad, but was indicted a few years later for graft and served time in a federal prison. Those who worked for the railroad or have studied the history of the New Haven Railroad still today debate the dastardly deeds of this flamboyant railroad president.

This photograph shows Patrick McGinnis in 1954 in the cab of a New Haven Railroad locomotive, from the Charles Gunn Papers in Archives & Special Collections.