Berlin: a History
By Rafaele Fierro
Berlin, Connecticut, with more than 20,000 people, extends five miles from north to south and about four miles east to west, in the southernmost portion of Hartford County cradled by the surrounding towns of Rocky Hill, Newington, New Britain, and Southington. Berlin is larger in area than the city of Hartford with five times fewer residents. And like other Connecticut towns, it is in constant flux, ever-changing in its demographics. The town reminds us of the great variation in the state’s 169 governing structures. Yet the passage of time has produced a striking reversal reminiscent of what has occurred elsewhere: Berlin once had much land mass with relatively very few people; today, the town has shrunk in size--thanks to its separation from parts of Wethersfield, Rocky Hill, Middletown, and Cromwell and New Britain’s separation from it--with a population roughly twenty times greater than it had been 200 years ago.
Early Berlin
In 300 acres that form what today includes parts of Wethersfield, Rocky Hill, Cromwell, and Middletown, a late seventeenth-century man set up his home along the Mattabesset River. Sergeant Richard Beckley must have been amazed at the vast stretches of land and the native peoples surrounding him. At one time or another, local tribes such as the Tunxis, Quinnipiacs, Wangunks, and Mattabessets graced the area today known as Berlin. At the time, no other whites inhabited land in the area. He had purchased his land from a Mattabesset chief by the name of Tarramuggus and promptly named it Beckley Quarter. His home, the oldest in Berlin, still stands today.
A short time later, in 1686, Captain Richard Seymour brought with him 14 families from Farmington to a remote southeastern section of town known as the Great Swamp Settlement. In so doing, they had to travel about ten miles to their church farther north. It took nearly twenty years, but by 1705 the settlers who had grown in number petitioned the Connecticut Colony’s General Assembly to make them a separate parish. There’s was known as the Great Swamp Church with the Reverend William Burnham leading it in 1712. The townspeople set up school districts in compliance with custom to establish one district for every 50 households. The General Assembly renamed the settlement Kensington in 1722, and as with other Connecticut towns during the era, an abundance of fertile land brought new settlers there.
The town’s population growth created a push for a new and larger church and as more people became members, an inexplicable “unrest in the church” caused polarization. In due course the church in Kensington was divided into the East and West Parishes. Settlers eventually called the West Parish the Kensington Congregational Church (1774) and the East Parish the Berlin Congregational Church (1775).
Residents in the eastern portion of Kensington petitioned the General Assembly to create a new town, at first denied, but then granted in 1785, the year in which Berlin officially was incorporated. Henceforth, Kensington and Berlin would be the two main sections of the same town until the twentieth century when modern highways created a third section known as East Berlin.
Population growth always seems to spur educational and commercial activity. Prior to the town being split into three parts, Berlin had more than 5,000 people living in it at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The Berlin Academy had been set up in years past to accommodate the growing number of children, but it was the hard work of educators who made the town’s successful instruction of children possible. One of them was Emma Hart Willard, who made it her calling to educate women at a time when they were thought to be intellectually inferior to men. Born in 1787, Willard had become a teacher at the Berlin Academy at the young age of 19. Judith Sargent Murray of Massachusetts, perhaps the most famous woman of the post-revolutionary era in the realm of education, achieved national stature, but Willard became a local hero for her educational innovations. Thanks to the efforts of townspeople like her, the Worthington Academy was built, educating and housing 125 students from neighboring areas, both girls and boys.
In the eighteenth century, Berlin was predominantly an agrarian and rural community relying upon the success of its farmers for its subsistence, particularly in the Kensington section of town. Blacksmith shops, grist mills, and saw mills, however, appeared along streams and rivers as early as the mid-eighteenth century, especially in the town’s Berlin portion. This activity adumbrated a more substantial industrialism in the early part of the next century as carriage making, silk worm raising, and general merchandizing had become common in the Worthington (New Britain by 1850) portion of town. Wagon makers and clock makers as well as pistol manufacturing became important local industries. Berlin grew and so too did the number of hotels and inns that lined the town’s streets, principally because of the town’s central location along the path from Hartford to New Haven.
If one type of early industrial activity commands a central place in the town’s history it is tin-making. Irish immigrants, William and Edward Pattison, had arrived in town in the 1740s and quickly began their tin production by importing the metal from England. Their first shop was on West Street in what is today Kensington and became profitable, so much so that they began peddling their product with a hand cart. The concept of the Yankee peddler, so much part of New England tradition, had been born. The tin industry remained lucrative for more than a century, despite the temporary halting of its production during the American Revolution and the War of 1812 because the metal could not be imported from the mother country.
One must remember, however, this commercial and industrial development was miniscule by today’s standards, a fact borne out by the scores of homes containing shops in their backyards and apprentices working in them. Life was local and tended to seem static from the perspective of those who lived at the time. Berlin residents, however, took pride in their self-reliant, hard-working, and persevering manner. If the defining national mood of the first half of the nineteenth century, summed up memorably in Benjamin Franklin’s words, was “a general happy mediocrity,” then Berlin was a microcosm of that ideal. It is what made the United States and Berlin’s place in it unique, perhaps exceptional.
This distinctness drew foreigners from abroad. By the 1850s, immigrants from Ireland, a remaining residue of the million strong who came from Ireland the previous decade due to the Potato Famine, added to the commercial activity and diversity of Berlin. The Irish set up a Catholic Church in no time. Reverend Luke Daly of Saint Mary’s Church gave the first mass for Catholics twenty years later. He was also instrumental in establishing Saint Paul’s Church on Berlin’s Main Street. Poles, Italians, Germans, Scandinavians, and even some former African American slaves joined their Irish counterparts in the second half of the century, and by then Berlin’s reputation as a town of significant ethnic diversity had been sealed.
Berlin Grows
In the book Images of Berlin by Kathleen L. Murray, a photograph of Charles Williams appears standing next to his horse-drawn buggy. Williams was a mail carrier and reportedly the nation’s first rural delivery man. At the moment the image was taken in the middle of the nineteenth century, it had become somewhat anachronistic. The horse is in an inert position as if to symbolize that its time—and that of a dying mode of transportation—had come to pass. Yankee peddlers, who in previous years had formed the backbone of Berlin’s commercial activity, had now become casualties of mass production and promptly went out of business. The great quantity of clay in the ground, for instance, made brick making a prevalent industry in Berlin. The town made bricks standard size long before President Calvin Coolidge ordered them produced nationally in the same manner in an effort to save cost in the 1920s. As late as the 1960s, Berlin would produce 90,000 bricks a day.
When the Berlin Railroad Depot opened as a way station on the New York, New haven, and Hartford line in the second half of the century, many began to take note that something different had emerged. Not coincidentally, New Britain became a separate town at mid-century and a city in 1871, because of the economic transformation affecting both areas that made them distinct commercial entities. As for the railroad depot, it is now owned by Amtrak and is one of the few rail stations still open.
Berlin residents began building the trolley line in the 1870s, cutting through the town and bringing passengers to neighboring New Britain, only to be replaced by the bus and the automobile two generation later in the 1920s. By then, of course, America itself had been transformed by Henry Ford’s revolution.
Industry swelled the town’s population. In many ways, the twentieth century was one of burgeoning populations across the country and the automobile gave a great number of people the opportunity to live in serene settings outside major cities. In 1942, part of Route 72 was redirected in Berlin with the construction of an interchange with the Berlin Turnpike. This split the eastern portion of town off from the rest of it. Berlin now contained three distinct sections of town known as Kensington, Berlin proper, and East Berlin. The building of Interstate-91 in the early 1960s further accelerated change. Throughout this time, of course, Berlin’s population increased dramatically: from 5,230 in 1940 to a whopping 11,250 (the increase due to the substantial number of war veterans returning home with their GI Bills giving them the opportunity for home ownership) in 1960, to 15,121 in 1980. The path toward suburb had now been cemented.
The history of Berlin High School parallels the growth of the town itself. Originally opened in 1953 to cater to the post-war baby boom, an addition was added in 1975. The school educated more than 700 students by 1989. And by the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, the town considered building a new high school to accommodate the increasing number of school children, but lack of funding and a slumping economy delayed action on the idea.
After the Second World War, the expansion of the volunteer fire department and police department occurred as well. The politics of the town were transformed too. Berlin became a town-manager style government by the mid-1990s—about a generation after many Connecticut towns had made the switch--to accommodate itself to the increasingly complex world of managing its people.
Conclusion
Despite the many changes that Berlin has undergone over the decades, the Berlin Fair has remained a constant and vital part of community life since the nineteenth century. Like so many such events in other Connecticut towns, the Berlin Fair had its genesis as part of an agrarian display of seeds, livestock, and community cohesion (in some towns it was rooted in that agrarian tradition known as the Grange Movement). In the twentieth century, the Berlin Fair, funded by the Berlin Lions Club, became the most celebrated community event in town, and an important way in which the town funded educational scholarships, town projects, and maintenance of the fair grounds. Few in Berlin have not been touched by the entertainment provided by this event or the impact it has had on the town’s allotment of resources.
Today a sky view of the town during the Berlin Fair reveals much of what Berlin has become. Hundreds of cars line the parking lot, seeming to dwarf the fairgrounds themselves. In fact, from 1990 to the present day, there has been a 20 percent increase in the town’s population, a pattern reflecting the modern suburb so ubiquitous a part of Connecticut. The more than 20,000 residents of this 26 square mile town—racially homogenous as more than 90 percent are white, but ethnically diverse—continue to take pride in their steady habits, including their attendance at the fair, but in the modern context of the twenty-first century.
Suggestions for Further Reading:
Doris Vroom Meyers, Berlin: Other Times, Other Voices (Berlin, CT: Berlin Free Library Association, 1985)
Kathleen Murray, Images of America: Berlin (Charleston, SC: Arcadia Publishing, 2001)
Catharine M. North, History of Berlin, Connecticut (New Haven, CT: The Tuttle, Morehouse, & Taylor Company, 1916)
http://www.town.berlin.ct.us/content/534/default.aspx,