Upriver History: Thompsonville's carpet mills, from Scottish hand looms in 1828 to Bigelow-Hartford
The company also built one of Connecticut's largest groups of mill housing, including the 1845 'Swiss cottages' of Cottage Green.
ENFIELD - In 1828, Orrin Thompson and a group of Scottish hand-loom weavers started making carpets in a small water-powered mill on Freshwater Brook, beginning the industry that built Thompsonville, according to the National Register nomination for the Bigelow-Hartford Carpet Mills Historic District.
Thompson went bankrupt in 1851 after investing heavily in power looms, the nomination says, and Hartford investors revived the business as the Hartford Carpet Company. It merged with E. S. Higgins of New York in 1901, with the Bigelow Carpet Company of Massachusetts in 1914 and with the Sanford Carpet Company of Amsterdam, N.Y., in 1929. In the 1920s Thompsonville was the largest carpet mill complex in the country, and in those years the company made about a tenth of the nation's carpet, by the nomination's estimate. Production ended in 1971.
The mills also housed their workers. The first cottages, known as Scottish Row, are gone. At Cottage Green, Henry G. Thompson's Enfield Manufacturing Company built single-family Gothic Revival houses around a grassy square in 1845, which people at the time called "Swiss cottages." From the 1880s into the early 1900s the company kept adding larger tenements, increasingly home to Polish, Italian, Greek and other immigrants, as employment rose to 2,900 by 1910.
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