Broadly about industries, businesses, trades, professions, etc.
Heading up Hayden Station Road from Palisado Avenue, just past the railroad tracks, there is an empty bit of pavement on the right. It’s so nondescript that a driver might just think it’s a [...]
The Broad Street Green area is the commercial center of Windsor, but it has been so for less time than you might think. In 1929, the green got a brand new building that would fundamentally change the character of the neighborhood.
The following is a transcript (edited for space and clarity) from a June 2004 interview between Dr. Daniel Mack and WHS executive director Christine Ermenc. Dr. Mack discusses his family's brickyard on Mack Street in [...]
Christopher Miner Spencer was an almost compulsive inventor and tinkerer from his childhood into his old age. The people who knew him best describe long hours of puzzling over problems he hoped to solve and designs he hoped to improve on inventions like his rifles, automatic screw machine, steam-powered boat, and automobiles. They also describe a man who was kind, generous, and friendly.
Canal transportation was no match for the speed and efficiency of the emerging railroads in the mid-19th century. But while the arrival of the railroad signaled the eventual demise of the Windsor Locks Canal, the decline in shipping on the canal was far more gradual than historians have previously supposed. One product in particular, gunpowder, was shipped through the canal for several decades after the railroad appeared.
The Eddy Electric Mfg. Co. occupied the three-story brick building to the east of the railroad depot in Windsor center. Here they built electric motors and generators from 1885 through 1902. One particular type of product that the company made formed the backbone of some of the world's earliest electric cars.
Antique collecting is a popular American pastime, with an estimated 25 million Americans on the hunt for historic and unique treasures. In 2005, curator Erin Stevic explored the fascinating world of milk bottle collecting and learned about a then recent gift to the Windsor Historical Society.
Combustion Engineering began construction of the first corporate campus in Windsor’s new business district on Day Hill Road in 1955 and employed thousands of workers in their nuclear and fossil fuel divisions over the next half-century.
Deacon John Moore was at the center of a nexus of important woodworking families that extended through four generations to include the Drakes, Bissells, Loomises, Barbers, Griswolds, Stoughtons and others. Together, these families largely controlled the woodworking trade in the region until the middle of the eighteenth century.
Acres of gladiolus blooms. Hundreds of thousands of rooted geranium and chrysanthemum cuttings. Greenhouses 150 feet long. It is so hard to picture it today, but in the mid-twentieth century, floriculture was very big business in Windsor.