Author Archives: Laura Smith

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Tariffville Dam on the Farmington River

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Tariffville Dam on the Farmington River, ca. 1915

The last two posts of this week showed some photographs of Walter Atkin, an employee at the Tariffville Dam, who went fishing from an open window at the hydroelectric station.  Those photographs were just three of many interesting images of the dam that we find in the Hartford Electric Light Company Records, one of which includes this beautiful wide angled shot of the dam, taken circa 1915.  

The  Tariffville Dam hydroelectric station was built in 1899 on the Farmington River in Simsbury, Connecticut, by the Hartford Electric Light Company.  It provided electricity to the Hartford area until at least August 1955, when it was destroyed by flooding caused by back to back hurricanes in August 1955. 
 
Laura Smith, Curator for Business, Railroad and Labor Collections

The Man With the Fish — Here’s the scoop

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Here’s the deal about the man with the fish. 

This gentleman is identified on the photograph as Walter Atkin who presumably worked at the Tariffville Dam hydroelectric station on the Farmington River in Simsbury, Connecticut.  The date of the photograph is 1948.  This photograph is from the Hartford Electric Light Company Records, a collection of business records of this company that we have here at the Dodd Research Center. 

The collection has these photos of Mr. Atkin fishing directly from a window in the power station, something I personally think is hilarious.  I wonder if his employers were aware that he was spending his time in this manner while on the job.  Hmmm…I wonder if my supervisors would approve my fishing in Mirror Lake during work time. 

Hey, it worked for Walter…

Laura Smith, Curator for Business, Railroad and Labor Collections

What’s With the Man With the Fish?

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Who is this man?  What’s with the fish on a stick?  What’s the story behind this photograph?

You want to know, don’t you?  Well, I’m not going to tell you, not yet.  What I want is YOU to tell ME what you think is going on here. 

Here’s a challenge to our loyal blog readers.  Use the comments to give your best guess.  Where is this man?  What year do you think this photo is from?  And why in the world is he grinning from ear to ear at the fish? 

Make up a story about him if you want. 

I’ll give you more information on Wednesday.  In the meantime, I want to hear from you about what you think is going on with this photo.

Cheers!

Laura Smith, Curator for Business, Railroad and Labor Collections

The magic of MAGIC: Providing a new way to navigate the Railroad Valuation Maps

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Many of our researchers have successfully accessed the online New Haven Railroad Valuation Maps, from the UConn Libraries’ Digital Mosaic site at http:/images.lib.uconn.edu/.  Although we have heard from many how useful it is to have the maps accessible to off-site researchers, we’ve also heard that the vagaries of ContentDM, the database system where the maps sit, don’t help them follow the railroad line from point to point.  The maps, which are each one mile footprints of the railroad tracks as they follow the complicated New Haven Railroad system as it was in 1915, have always been rather isolated from, and unlinked to, each other.

New Haven Railroad Valuation Map of Hartford, Connecticut, now accessible from a map index at http://magic.lib.uconn.edu/mash_up/nynhhrr_index.html

Happily, that glitch is now overcome, thanks to the the magnificent efforts of the Map and Geographic Information Center, better known as MAGIC, an important special library within the UConn Libraries system.  MAGIC, headed by Geographic Information Systems Librarian Michael Howser, has created a map index that now allows researchers to follow the railroad lines on a map and click at any point to bring up the 1915 valuation map. 

You will find the index at http://magic.lib.uconn.edu/mash_up/nynhhrr_index.html

Isn’t this great?! One could even say that this is truly, well, magical.  Tools like this make viewing the maps so much easier.  You will see, though, that as of this moment you can search only the Connecticut railroad valuation maps.  MAGIC has plans to, in time, complete the index, to encompass all of the maps that are currently in the Digital Mosaic, which include Massachusetts, Rhode Island and eastern New York.  Something else I want to point out is that the index makes it obvious that there are gaps in the system, that there are sections where, although the railroad ran between some points, there are no maps that covered these areas.  The fault of this lies in the fact that our original set of valuation maps was never absolutely complete, and that is reflected in the online maps.

I want to extend my most sincere thanks to Michael Howser and his staff, particularly Geography PhD student Jie Lin, who made this index a reality.   You’ve made a lot of railroad researchers VERY happy!

Laura Smith, Curator for Business, Railroad and Labor Collections

June 2011 Item of the Month: Railroad Men and their Magnificent Machines

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1881, Housatonic Railroad locomotive and crew

Charles Dickens, in his 1842 book American Notes, wrote about an excursion he took by train from Boston to Lowell, Massachusetts.  He describes his trip in this way: “[The train] whirls headlong…clatters over frail arches, rumbles upon the heavy ground, shoots beneath a wooden bridge which intercepts the light for a second like a wink, suddenly awakens all the slumbering echoes in the main street of a large town, and dashes on haphazard, pell-mell, neck-or-nothing, down the middle of the road…there – on, on, on – tears the mad dragon of an engine with its train of cars; scattering in all directions a shower of burning sparks from its wood fire, screeching, hissing, yelling, panting; until at last the thirsty monster stops beneath a covered way to drink, the people cluster round, and you have time to breathe again.”

Takes your breath away, doesn’t it?

Railroads came on the scene in the United States in the early 1830s and immediately took hold of the national psyche, changing concepts of speed and time and providing limitless possibilities of the movement of agricultural products, goods of industry, and people to all points across the country.  The railroad was the means that brought the Industrial Revolution to the United States, ushering in the modern world we know today.  To the people of the 19th century, the railroad was a dream, a miracle, a danger, and the most marvelous thing they had ever seen.

The Railroad History Archive has many thousands of photographs.  Most focus on locomotives and scenes of the New Haven Railroad, the predominant railroad line in southern New England from 1872 to 1968.  We have photographs of railroad stations and other structures, railroad yards, passenger cars and dining cars.  We have photographs of railroad bridges, railroad tunnels, and railroad trestles.

But few photographs are as evocative as the one above, where railroad men pose with the nation’s new obsession. 

For more information about the Railroad History Archive, visit http://railroads.uconn.edu/

Laura Smith, Curator for Business, Railroad and Labor Collections

A traveling exhibit “travels” back home — All in a Day’s Work: Photographs of Women in Connecticut Industry

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Women employees at the Cheney Brothers Silk Manufacturing Company mill in Manchester, Connecticut, ca. 1925.

You are cordially invited to the Dodd Research Center to view the exhibit “All in a Day’s Work: Photographs of Women in Connecticut Industry from the Collections of the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center,” now available in the West Corridor until the end of June. The exhibit, which shows photographs from the Business Collections, was the brainchild of UConn Waterbury campus librarian Shelley Goldstein, who developed the exhibit to travel around the regional campuses (and hopefully to other venues) and to promote library outreach. The exhibit opened in Waterbury in March and then it spent the month of April at the Avery Point campus. It is now in Storrs for the summer (at the DRC first and then in the Homer Babbidge Library in July and August) before completing the rounds at the regional libraries through the fall.

You can find all of the photographs in the exhibit, plus the travel schedule, at http://doddcenter.uconn.edu/exhibits/days_work/index.htm.

Laura Smith, Curator for Business, Railroad and Labor Collections

Happy 40th Birthday, Amtrak!

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Amtrak's train 83 rounds curve as it kicks up the fresh snow at Old Saybrook, Connecticut. Photograph by Robert LaMay, January 2011.

May 1 was Amtrak’s 40th Birthday! In celebration of this event we’ve put up an exhibit in the McDonald Reading Room of photographs and timetables showing the trains of Amtrak. All of the photographs were taken by Robert LaMay, whose collection we have in the Railroad History Archive.

For more inforamation about Amtrak’s 40th anniversary and National Train Day on May 7, visit http://www.nationaltrainday.com/turning-40/. For more information about the Railroad History Archive, visit http://railroads.uconn.edu/

Laura Smith, Curator for Business, Railroad and Labor Collections

James Klar Photograph of the Old Saybrook switch tower

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Old Saybrook, Connecticut, switch tower, on the New Haven Railroad. Photograph taken by James S. Klar, 1975.

James S. Klar spent his working life as a city planner, but his first love was photography. After he retired he indulged in his passion full-time, and received training in photography techniques. In 1975 he received a grant from the Connecticut Commission on the Arts to photograph 75 railroad stations in southern New England for an exhibition. This photograph of the Old Saybrook Interlocking, or switch, tower, was taken on June 10, 1975, for the exhibition.

James Klar died in 1985 and in 1990 his wife Marjorie donated the photographs from the exhibition to the Railroad History Archive at the Dodd Research Center. The photographs show exquisite details of old railroad stations and structures, many of them dilapidated.

The interlocking tower in Old Saybrook was built in 1912, for the New York, New Haven & Hartford Railroad. An interlocking, or switch, tower was an important feature for railroad safety. It allowed the tower operator to communicate with railroad personnel about train movements, and to control junction switches and signals with a bank of levers on the second floor. In the 1920s the mechanical interlocking was replaced by banks of electrical relays, which were replaced by pneumatic assists. By the 1970s changes in dispatching technology rendered the tower obsolete and it was closed. The tower was razed in June 1998.

This photograph of the switching levers on the second floor of the tower was taken in 1997 by Robert Brewster when it was recorded for a Historic American Buildings Survey, which you can find in the Connecticut Historic Preservation Collection at the Dodd Research Center.

Laura Smith, Curator for Business, Railroad and Labor Collections

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 popularily 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 newletters, 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 http://doddcenter.uconn.edu/findaids/Thermos/MSS19890098.html.

Laura Smith, Curator for Business, Railroad and Labor Collections

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 collection see the finding aid at http://doddcenter.uconn.edu/findaids/SNET/MSS19970122.html.  Two online exhibits that feature photographs from the collection are available from the electronic exhibits page, being from our electronic exhibits page at http://doddcenter.uconn.edu/exhibits/electronic.htm.

Laura Smith, Curator for Business, Railroad and Labor Collections

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.  You can find information about the spot at http://www.yourpublicmedia.org/content/wnpr/probing-microbes.

Laura Smith, Curator for Business, Railroad and Labor Collections