More Lasting than Brass: A Thread of Family from Revolutionary New York to Industrial Connecticut (review)

In More Lasting than Brass, Peter Haring Judd follows one "thread" of his family tree from revolutionary-era New York through Connecticut's industrial decline in the mid-twentieth century. Combining a genealogist's eye for detail and familial connections with a historian's appreciation for social and economic context, Judd provides his readers with an examination of individual experiences that illuminates abstract historical developments. Judd draws upon a wealth of sources, including family letters, probate, census, land, church, and vital records to tell the story of his family's experiences. He traces his Haring ancestors' movement from the agricultural communities of revolutionary New York to the flourishing commercial centers of Albany and New York City, experiences that capture both the geographic and social mobility of the new nation. Through marriage, the prosperous mercantile family moved into the late nineteenth-century industrial economy of Waterbury, Connecticut, a city once known as the "Brass Capital of the World." Ownership of and investment in Waterbury's metal-working factories achieved tremendous prosperity for the family and permitted them lives of privilege characterized by college educations (for the men), European tours, live-in servants, and membership in refined social circles. The family's affluence allowed it to weather the Great Depression; however, changes in the global industrial economy in the mid-twentieth century left most Waterbury factories unable to compete. The author himself had to sell the family's factory, ending the Harings' association with Waterbury manufacturing on the eve of Connecticut's industrial decline.

Given the interests of the JER's readers, I will focus my review on the first four chapters of Judd's work, a section that chronicles the Haring family's experiences during the Revolution, early national, and antebellum eras. Judd begins by exploring the roles that John Haring and James Clark—whose children later would marry—played in the American Revolution. Both Haring and Clark were middling folk, landowners who supported and worked for the Patriot cause, Clark as a junior officer in the New York militia who saw action on Long Island, Manhattan, and in the Hudson Valley, Haring as a civilian leader in Tappan, in Orange County. The experiences of Haring and his family, who lived in an area subject to raids and plundering by both British and Continental forces, provide a particularly telling glimpse of how ordinary people endured the war. As Judd explains, although the "Revolution is often taught as a series of battles—the experiences of those who lived in Tappan and the 'neutral ground' tell a different story. John Haring and his family had to cope with continual devastation and civil chaos during the war years" (40).

The sacrifices that Haring, Clark, and their families made during the Revolution paid rich dividends after independence. The Revolution opened land for development in upstate and western New York, and Haring's son Samuel, who married Clark's daughter Sarah, took advantage of cheap land and increased agricultural trade to launch a mercantile career, first in Albany, then in New York City. By the late 1790s Samuel's uncle Abraham Herring was established in New York in the dry goods trade. In a chapter focusing on the Herring branch of the family, Judd details the land speculation, agricultural trade, and access to credit that made possible Abraham Herring's successful career.

Samuel Haring did not achieve the success that his uncle did. The beginning of his career was promising: the sale of land he owned in central New York and access to credit through his Herring relatives helped Samuel establish himself as a grocer in the wholesale trade. Samuel's commission as a quartermaster in 1812 interrupted his business, however, and Judd's account of Haring's experiences in the War of 1812 provides a firsthand glimpse of the incompetence that characterized this contest in...