By the 1820s, people throughout the state were worried. Everywhere in Connecticut, urban growth occurred. ![]() The nineteenth century saw the development of rural villages, as well as mill cities – clusters of houses, shops, and other central-place activities that funneled farm produce into the mill cities and villages, to feed to hundreds of new industrial workers. A fire in one house, store, shop, or barn could grow quickly into an inferno that could destroy an entire neighborhood, leaving dozens or even hundreds homeless.Įven outside of Willimantic, Danielson, Baltic, Putnam, and the other factory cities – and smaller mill villages like South Windham, Wauregan, South Coventry, and Atwoodville – fires became a more serious problem. A score of thickly settled mill villages and factory cities sprang up across eastern Connecticut, creating an environment where fires could jump easily from building to building. “In silence ever shalt thou lye,” she wrote sadly of her destroyed home, “Adieu, Adieu All’s vanity.”īut in the nineteenth century, industrialization changed the ways that people confronted fires. Bradstreet tried to shrug off the loss, but lamented, “My pleasant things in ashes lye, / And them behold no more shall I.” The fire consumed her entire house: the roof, the dinner table, the window where she lit candles for her husband when he was away, and – most painfully – the room where her children were married. With no fire departments, firefighters, or fire equipment, victims like Bradstreet had little choice but to stoically endure the loss of their houses and possessions. I, starting up, the light did spye, / And to my God my heart did cry / … Then coming out beheld a space, / The flame consume my dwelling place.” “That fearfull sound of fire and fire, / Let no man know is my Desire. “I waken’d was with thundring nois / And Piteous shrieks of dreadful voice,” Bradstreet wrote, echoing the dread that also must have gripped fire victims in Connecticut. One of the most evocative descriptions of a fire in rural colonial New England comes from the pen of the poet Anne Bradstreet, a Massachusetts Puritan, whose house burned in 1666. Still, those families whose houses or barns caught fire were often devastated. Fires were unlikely to spread from one house to another, so fire departments, firefighters, and fire equipment seemed unnecessary. ![]() Almost everyone lived on dispersed farms, separated from the neighbors by acres of fields and managed woodlots. In the 1600s and 1700s, Connecticut had few villages and no cities. The history of fire in Connecticut is closely linked to the history of industrialization, for the Industrial Revolution that brought the textile mills to eastern Connecticut also brought greater danger from fire.īefore the Industrial Revolution, fires were tragedies for individual families but didn’t really pose problems for communities as a whole.
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