From collection Eastern Illustrating & Publishing Company Collection
J.H. Sessions & Son Mill, Bristol, Conn. 92.
Shown is a multi-story brick industrial building with a tower and a sawtooth roof wing. This image is part of a series made by one of the three Eastern Illustrating & Publishing Company photographers assigned to cover New England or upstate New York. The quest for images that would be saleable as postcards resulted in the documentation of small towns and small town life at the turn of the 20th century. As the photos were shot, the glass plates were promptly sent back to Belfast, Maine, and processed into postcards at the printing plant on High Street. The Eastern photographer has come upon yet another complex emblematic of the hardware manufacturing which dominated Connecticut industry in the 19th and early 20th centuries. According to Clouette and Roth in their "Connecticut...Inventory of Historic Engineering and Industrial Sites", the Sessions family had been in the business of producing metal, and later, cast iron and brass fittings in Bristol: "J.H. Sessions' hardware fabricating shop and....foundry were run as one operation until 1902, when J.H. Sessions, Jr. formed the separate firms of J.H. Sessions & Son and Sessions Foundry Co. In 1907 a separate plant was built on Riverside Ave. for J.H. Sessions & Son..." Likely this is that plant. [source: Clouette and Roth, "Connecticut: An Inventory of Historic Engineering and Industrial Sites". Society for Industrial Archeology, 1981.]
