By Elizabeth Pratt Fox

“Everyone in Cheshire, at some time or other, works in the Button Shop.”

—Edward Gumprecht, The One Hundred Years of Button Manufacturing in Cheshire, 1950

For almost 150 years, workers walked the floors of the Ball & Socket Manufacturing Company. Originally formed as Cheshire Manufacturing in 1850, the company was a major producer of buttons and fasteners for textiles. The site of the factory buildings was chosen for its proximity to the New Haven and Northampton Railroad, newly built in 1848 along the towpath of the former Farmington Canal, which enabled products to be shipped to the port city of New Haven and beyond by rail or ship.

Ball & Socket Manufacturing was founded when Cheshire was primarily an agricultural community. Cheshire never became an industrial center, but other small mills and factories were scattered around town during the second half of the 19th century. The Mix Manufacturing Company made Britannia spoons and later gimlets and auger bits; the Cheshire Brass Company produced sheet brass; and the Capewell Horse Nail Company, which later moved to Hartford, manufactured horseshoe nails. The Ball & Socket Manufacturing Company flourished, becoming the largest factory in town and one of the largest manufacturers of metal buttons in the world.

Digging into company archives and census data reveals the stories of the men, women, and children who worked in the factory. In some cases, multiple children from the same family worked for the company. Some people spent decades at their posts. After the factory closed in 1994, the site remained vacant for 20 years. In 2014, the founders of Ball & Socket Arts, the current owner of the factory site, reenvisioned the contaminated, water-damaged, and boarded-up factory as a center of culture for Cheshire and central Connecticut.

A Button for All Seasons

Not long after the factory’s opening, Arad W. Welton, the company’s first president, applied for a patent for “a new and useful Improvement in the Mode of Manufacturing Glass-Centered Buttons.” According to the patent application, this improvement enabled Ball & Socket to produce a button “very desirable for its beauty,” “especially adapted to children’s and ladies’ dresses,” and “much more durable than any kind of painted or enameled button now in use.” Because the color was on the inside, the button was “protected from injury from any source.” Thanks to this innovation, the factory became famous for its fancy buttons made of brass-backed glass, known as “Cheshire Jewels.”

The company also produced buttons made of stamped metal and fabric, as well as metal trimmings for hose supporters, thumbtacks, and wall hooks. One worker recalled the buttons made from Brazil nuts, also called vegetable ivory. The nuts were shipped from Brazil to Boston, then to New Haven, and finally to Cheshire by the canal railroad. The stockpile of nuts attracted cockroaches, and on Sundays, when the factory was closed, one could hear the insects chomping on the nuts.

During the Civil War, Ball & Socket Manufacturing produced brass uniform buttons for Union and Confederate forces. The company continued to make uniform buttons for American troops during the two world wars and for the Soviet army and de Gaulle’s Free French army in North Africa during World War II. During the Great War, a survey by the War Industries Board’s Priorities Committee recorded the factory as employing 58 men and 53 women, with the factory contributing 10 percent of its production directly to the government or its allies. It noted that the scarcity of coal, lacquer, brass, and steel might curtail Ball & Socket’s production. During the Second World War, the U.S. War Production Board listed buttons as a priority product, but due to wartime metal rationing, the factory also turned to producing parts for machine guns, gas masks, parachutes, and walkie-talkies. Ball & Socket Manufacturing continued to produce brass buttons for both the military and civilians until it closed in 1994. It also produced other stamped metal goods, including jingle bells, miniature furniture, doorknobs, and whistles.

A Modern Factory

In 1886, according to the Barlow Insurance Company, Cheshire Manufacturing’s main building covered an area of 130 feet by 26 feet, spanning two stories and a basement, with a wing measuring 56 feet by 26 feet. All the structures were wood framed with shingle roofs and were described as “considerably worn.” Nevertheless, the working conditions were good, “giving evidence of care and good management.” In 1901, the company acquired the Ball & Socket Fastener Company of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and changed its name to the Ball & Socket Manufacturing Company.

The first two decades of the 20th century were a period of growth for the company. Between 1909 and 1919, the site was transformed with the demolition of most of the wooden structures and the building of fireproof brick ones. Only one of the original wooden buildings survives. By 1918, the factory site was described in Everett Gleason Hill’s A Modern History of New Haven and Eastern New Haven County as “new and of the most modern construction and equipped with up-to-date machinery.” Hill noted that “improvements are constantly being made and it is known as one of the most progressive industrial enterprises in Cheshire.” The new, larger factory site featured a stockroom, a tool and shipping room, a power plant, and a dip room for the chemical polishing of metal.

The main office building, facing West Main Street, was built in the neo-Jacobean style. W. S. Richardson, then president of the factory, chose the style of the building to resemble the older buildings of Chester, the county seat of Cheshire, England. Over the massive doorway, he installed the Cheshire coat of arms and chose leaded glass windows and offices clad in paneled oak. Interestingly, he elected to partially hide the modern industrial glass and brick factory behind a building that hearkened back to the preindustrial past. The factory also changed the wider landscape as the owners built stately homes on the hill leading up to the town center. Between 1906 and 1910, the company built two tenement houses on West Main Street and purchased a house on the corner adjacent to the factory as a workers’ residence.

Workers of All Ages

By 1870, 20 years after it was founded, Cheshire Manufacturing had a workforce of 15 men, 25 women, and 20 children. Ten years later, the 1880 census shows that the factory

employed 93 people, including 38 women and 14 children. Many were the children of immigrants born in England or Ireland. Their fathers farmed or worked in the local tool and brass factories or copper mines. For instance, four of the Jenkins family’s eight children, aged 14 to 19, worked in the “Button Shop” in 1880. Their father, William, worked in a copper mine. Both parents and the five oldest children were born in England. The Jenkinses were not the only family with multiple children working at Ball & Socket; the 1880 census lists 19 families with multiple members working in the shop.

The presence of child workers at Ball & Socket Manufacturing illustrates the fact that, after the Civil War, the employment of children was extended from the farm to the factory. Factory owners employed children because they could pay them less than adults, and their small bodies could fit under the often dangerous machinery to retrieve parts. In the late 19th century, about 10 percent of Ball & Socket’s workers were children under the age of 15. In 1880, the youngest worker was 10-year-old William Richards. His mother, Anna, was the sole parent of four children. In the 1880 census, she and her children were listed as “pauper and indigent inhabitants” and either lived at the Cheshire poor house or boarded elsewhere at public expense. Young William was the only family member working. Another girl, 12-year-old Ellen Andrews, is listed in the 1880 census as working at the factory. Her parents emigrated from England, and her father, Christopher, worked as a laborer and could neither read nor write.

Edward Williams Sr. worked in the factory for 62 years, starting in 1886 at the age of 15. Born in Connecticut, he was the son of a father born in England. One of his daily assignments was to see that all the lamps were filled with kerosene and hung from each machine. Initially, he worked ten hours a day for six days a week. He wrote in his diary, “I worked 72 1/2 hours in one week in November 1900. The shop worked until 9 p.m. some weeks.” Men set, cut, burnished, and polished the dies; women assembled the buttons. Most of the work was repetitive, with each worker standing at the same station for hours. Williams listed the people who worked in the factory, and it was a cross section of Cheshire residents and those from neighboring towns.

At the same time that Edward Wiliams Sr. was working at the factory, a young woman named Anna Tonnotti was using foot power to stamp out the buttons. She was born in 1912 to Michael and Mary Mongillo, who had emigrated from Italy to Southington, where they raised nine children. Anna found work at the Ball & Socket Manufacturing Company in 1928 at the age of 16 and worked there until she retired in 1977. Anna lived in a tight-knit Italian neighborhood in the Milldale section of Southington. From this location, she would have been able to take the trolley, or later the bus, to work at the factory in Cheshire. Anna relied on her mother and other relatives to care for her only child, a daughter, while she worked a 40-hour week. The foot pedal she operated for many years was recently donated to Ball & Socket Arts.

The company offered a three-year apprenticeship to minors. One of those apprentices was Milton Martyny, whose 1916 contract explained that the program was “for his own advancement and the interest of the company.” From New York City, Martyny was the son of immigrants from Austria. According to the 1905 New York state census, his father was employed in the “gents furnishing” industry in the city, and Milton was the only son listed. After his three-year apprenticeship in Cheshire, Milton qualified for a job in New York City as a toolmaker.

Unlike the workers at many factories and mills in Connecticut, the employees of Ball & Socket never unionized. The factory was owned by people who lived in town, with most of the stockholders living within a few miles of the factory. Perhaps such factors as good pay and working conditions and its location in a small town played a role in the lack of a union. Today, many Cheshire residents have relatives who worked in the factory until its operations ceased in 1994.

The Transformation

In 2014, Ball & Socket Arts set out to transform the space into a hub of arts, culture, and community. The former factory site will house art galleries, live music venues, retail shops, casual and fine dining, mission-related rentals, and outdoor spaces. In 2023, Ball & Socket Arts completed restoring two of its five historic buildings. Building 2, the wood-framed building that was not torn down in the early 20th century, now houses an ice cream shop on the lower level and Artsplace, the only town-owned arts school in Connecticut, on the second level. Building 3, the Woodworking Shop, holds a meeting room and an art gallery. Creative writing classes are offered on-site, and indoor music events are held at a local historic church.

The state of Connecticut funded the environmental cleanup, and a number of funders—including the Connecticut Department of Economic and Community Development, the town of Cheshire, the 1772 Foundation, Preservation Connecticut, and private donors—supported the restoration of the buildings. The installation of a fire protection system was funded by the federal government. Work on Building 1, the largest part of the campus at 45,000 square feet, is now underway.

The path of the nearby New Haven and Northampton Railroad has also been transformed into the popular Farmington Canal Linear Trail. The site connects to the trail, so walkers and bikers can visit the site, grab an ice cream cone, attend an outdoor concert, and visit an exhibition. Ball & Socket Arts received funds through Connecticut Humanities to install signs at the canal entrance and on the front lawn, giving visitors a map of the site, as well as a history of the factory, its products, and the people who made them. Planning for interpretation of the site, including a gallery dedicated to the site’s history, was recently funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Presenting the site’s history is an important part of its current development. Saving, preserving, and interpreting these historic structures have contributed to the town’s West Main Street Business District Revitalization Plan, with the Ball & Socket Arts site as a key component. Once again, the factory echoes with the sound of footsteps just like those that graced the buildings during the Ball & Socket Manufacturing Company’s 150 years in business.

 

Elizabeth Pratt Fox is a retired museum and historic site consultant and a supporter of Ball & Socket Arts. She has written a number of articles for Connecticut Explored.