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Chapter 7 Completion of the Trout Brook System
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Chapter 7 Completion of the Trout Brook System From the standpoint of inventions with the potential to change the way people live, the last decade and a half of the nineteenth century was one of the most important periods in American history. Electricity improved life in the manufactories as prosperous owners embraced the new technology for the increased production it would deliver. The average family still used kerosene lamps at home while their wealthier counterparts preferred gaslights, but brighter electric streetlights made Hartford a safer place for everyone. Along with this mysterious new form of energy came the telephone. By the mid-1880s, there were a great number of telephones in the city, revolutionizing the way people communicated with one another. Hartford was a sophisticated city during the Victorian age, its stores boasting of almost every product and service extant and stood ready to meet the needs of a wide spectrum of customers from the country and the city alike. In addition to a large collection of haberdashers, milliners, dress shops and department stores, there were sixteen publishing houses, seventy boot & shoemakers, thirty blacksmiths, twenty private schools and a hundred and fifty saloons. The dirt streets continued to create a dusty atmosphere even though steamrollers packed them down to a rock-hard surface and the city’s street department watered them four times a day with horse-drawn tank wagons. The city’s street crews, called “bluebirds”—because of the color of their uniforms— even hand-swept the main thoroughfares. Children walked the railroad tracks to school rather than dirty their shoes in mud puddles or piles of manure. The horse cars shuttled people along the major avenues to work, doctor’s appointments, shopping, or just visiting friends. It was these horse cars that were primarily responsible for Hartford’s lofty perch as the last word in shopping excellence. Brown, Thomson & Co. and G. Fox & Co., sitting side by side on Main Street, battled it out for the retail dollar by catering to customers from all over the state. It was the ability of the horse cars to deliver shoppers from nearby towns that allowed Hartford stores to prosper mightily. When the young German immigrant, Gershon Fox, began in the retail trade just before mid-century, he operated out of a seven- by nine-foot basement holein -the-wall at 126 Main Street, selling silks, cravats, vests, and collars. With the steady flow of customers from greater Hartford arriving by horsecar and an awe-inspiring amount of raw energy on his part, within a few decades he was able to open a full department store. From his days as a marginal merchant, Fox learned that price was the single most important ingredient in the retail business and prided himself on his ability to offer goods at the cheapest price. As he upgraded the quality of the merchandise, his ever-growing department store— the mighty G. Fox & Co.—became the gold standard in style and elegance. 157 Not long after Gershon Fox began his retailing career in Hartford, a Scottish immigrant, James Thomson—together with two partners—opened Brown, Thomson & Co. Even at the beginning of his career, when his dry goods store took up only a portion of the first floor of the Cheney Brothers building on Main Street, Thomson was preoccupied with growth. His advertisements always trumpetted “The Big Store,” and, sure enough, his lines quickly expanded until he was renting the whole, enormous first floor of the building. Thomson had no interest in Fox’s preoccupation with cheap merchandise, instead focusing on the high end of the retail market. His store—“Hartford’s Great Shopping Center”— favoring the most fashionable collection of goods money could buy. By the late 1800s, Brown, Thomson & Co. was the largest department store in Connecticut. Goods arrived at these great stores mostly by railroad and, to a lesser degree, by steamship. The railroad was still the chief mover of freight, mail and passengers while the steamboats continued to haul cargo and passengers to and from coastal ports along the Eastern seaboard. The steamship business was, however, still constricted by its slow speed and the weather, the whole waterfront at Hartford closing down for the entire winter each year. In the 1880s, more than a hundred sea and river captains made their home in the city and 796 vessels visited Hartford’s wharfs annually. A number of vessels, like the Granite State and the City of Hartford, continued to offer luxurious, but inexpensive, overnight accommodations to New York. First...