From collection Eastern Illustrating & Publishing Company Collection
The Bristol Brass Corp. Mill, Bristol, Conn. 89.
View of a 19th century brick industrial complex, including a mill with a monitor on its roof, and an administrative building, situated along a city street. 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 captured a quiet, ordinary moment when a horse-driven carriage has just passed a yong man sitting on the curb, reading a newspaper. It is also an image of the earliest structures -- a mill building and office - built for the Bristol Brass and Clock Company before becoming strictly a producer of brass. The transition had been made by the time the picture was taken. According to Clouette and Roth, "Bristol Brass and Clock Co. was founded in 1850 by a partnership consisting of clock manufacturers from Bristol and brass entrepreneurs from the Naugatuck Valley. For forty years the output of brass was entirely consumed in clock [mechanism] production at this plant and other clock factories in Bristol. Around 1890 the firm discontinued production of its own clocks to concentrate solely on primary brass production, making the alloy and then rolling it into sheet or rod...The plant...is divided by Broad St...for the most part, the 19th century buildings are north of and the 20th century buildings to the south. The earliest structure is the c.1885 mill originally used for rolling rod. ..The 1891 brick office (building, seen here) has two sections, one with hip roof and one with gable roof..." [source: Clouette and Roth, "Connecticut: An Inventory of Historic Engineering and Industrial Sites"]
