That benevolence shifted a bit when workers threatened to join a machinists’ union in 1901. The factory shut down briefly but opened again when negotiators agreed to let workers form committees, though not a union.67 Pope also agreed to a nine-hour day and a raise in pay.
Many of Frog Hollow’s industrialists had served their apprenticeships beneath the blue dome of Colt’s in the southeastern part of the city, but not Pope. Yet both Pope and Colt understood that their fortunes depended on their workers’ happiness. Pope purchased land that had been the old Bartholomew family farm to the southwest of his factory, and donated ninety acres for the creation of a park. Designed by the famous Olmsted brothers, the park included tennis courts and a rolling lawn. Pope said, “I believe that a large part of the success of any manufacturing enterprise depends on the health, happiness and orderly life of its employees.”68
To hawk his bikes, Pope sponsored races and a bicycle-riding school and promoted public parks as tremendous places to test a bike. He countered certain clergy members’ assertions that bike riding on Sunday was wrong with the suggestion that churches build bike barns similar to the ones outside his factory, so worshippers could ride to church. And wasn’t exercise a form of worshipping God?
He also founded the League of American Wheelmen, pushed for better roads through a magazine devoted to the joys of cycling, and endowed positions in highway engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to make the roads smoother.69 Without good roads, Pope knew, bicycles were little more than expensive paperweights.
But as with the Weed bust of a few years earlier, the bicycle boom was relatively short-lived. By the turn of the last century, consumers began to crave transportation that did not require pedaling. Pope’s company was slightly slow to catch on, and for a few months they suffered from overproduction amid falling demand. But then Pope started a Motor Carriage Department. And there Pope applied the same energy to the creation of his version of the horseless carriage. The first product was an electric car, the “Mark III,” in 1897. Using technology honed in the manufacture of bicycles, the Pope plant “was truly the nursery of the infant [automobile] industry,” according to one observer.70 Just as they had figured out how to keep bicycle riders from pitching over the handlebars, Pope engineers began to finesse electric motors.
In short order, American consumers could choose from the Pope-Tribune, the Pope-Waverly, the Pope-Toledo, and the Pope-Hartford, a midpriced auto that went for $3,200 and was priced squarely between Ford models that sold for $1,000–$2,000 and the higher-priced Packard at $7,000.71 By 1899 Pope had all but single-handedly turned Hartford into the center of the automotive world.72
Two of Pope’s employees, George H. Day and Hiram Percy Maxim, set out to create workable engines, but Day’s heart was not in gasoline-powered contraptions. In fact, by one account, when faced with an engine, he shook his head and asked if the engines had to have so many gears and so much oil. “We are on the wrong track,” Day was supposed to have said. “No one will buy a carriage that has to have all that greasy machinery in it. It might be that young fellows like you … would buy a few of them as interesting toys, but that would be only a drop in the bucket.”73
Pope wholeheartedly agreed, “because you can’t get people to sit over an explosion.”74 (Sigh.)
While Pope’s employees focused on perfecting a two-seated electric car—also called the Columbia—Midwest manufacturers, Henry Ford among them, were aiming for the middle market with mass-produced (and cheaper) manufacturing. In 1899 Pope’s company produced more than half of the cars in the United States.75 The Courant predicted in 1905 that the Columbia car was showing massive improvement, due in part to the addition of nickel-steel parts. The company would continue its production of electric delivery wagons and trucks and was entertaining large advance orders.76
But along with Thomas Edison, Ford was as talented as an industrialist as he was skilled at lawyering up. Pope and Ford rather quickly went to court, and eventually Pope’s legal issues with Ford took too much time and energy. That, along with his reluctance to pursue a workable gas engine, relegated Albert Pope to the edges of history. People in Hartford know him. People in Frog Hollow certainly know him. But the world at large knows Henry Ford and his vision of assembly line manufacturing—something he borrowed from his Hartford competitor. History is not always fair.
In other Frog Hollow factories a combination of bad luck and bad planning made the machines go dark, which eventually left the neighborhood without a manufacturing base. In June 1875 the Courant carried a story about rumors that Sharps Rifle would move to Bridgeport. It was evident, said the story, that the gun was “the best breech-loading arm manufactured in the world,” and the article called for Hartford capitalists to fight to keep Sharps, as “we have not so many manufactories here that we can afford to spare any of them.”77
In 1886 the Weed company announced at its annual stockholder meeting that the capital stock of the company had shrunk from $600,000 to $240,000.78 From a high of seventy-five dollars a share, Weed shares had slipped to five dollars.
In July 1914 Billings & Spencer paid $250,000 for the old Columbia motorcar plant on Laurel Street. Columbia’s time had passed, while Billings & Spencer had just added two hundred workers to their workforce of six hundred. The company intended to expand its production of wrenches and small tools. The purchase included 8¼ acres of land, roughly 2¼ of which were buildings. The company made twenty-three different kinds of wrenches and with its drop-forge work had a direct line to Detroit and its car factories. The factory was near the railroad, and rents in the neighborhood were “reasonable,” according to the Courant.79
Despite the relative economic success of the neighborhood, Frog Hollow’s business fronts didn’t have the shiny windows and fancy entrances of downtown Hartford. For all the development of the previous fifty years, at the turn of the last century the place had the feel of a throwback to early Hartford. It was almost as if buildings had been put up so quickly to accommodate the influx that no one had thought of aesthetics. Not to fear. A writer in the Courant suggested that the prosperity of the neighborhood would eventually force establishments to catch up to the rest of the modern city.80 The market, and consumers, would demand it.
And then the United States entered World War I, and as had happened during the Civil War, Hartford’s workforce worked overtime. Between 1917 and 1918, the bulk of the state’s industry was involved in defense contracting, with Hartford at the center of the effort.81 In Frog Hollow and elsewhere, the factories that had remained essentially never closed during wartime, and the need for workers was unending.
Billings & Spencer plant, Laurel Street. Publisher, Chapin News Company, Hartford. Richard L. Mahoney Collection, Hartford History Center, Hartford Public Library
Defense jobs opened the doors to a new group of workers looking for better wages. In 1916 there were 25,063 factory workers in Hartford and about 20 percent of them were women.82 Women were considered neater than their male colleagues at Pratt, where many of them worked making drawings of the various weapons, such as Russian rifles and British guns.83
A 1919 Courant headline called the increased productivity “War’s Miracles in City’s Factories.” The factory’s armies, said the article by David D. Bidwell, swelled by fourteen thousand hands. The output of taxable goods increased by 250 percent, and at the time of the armistice in 1918, Hartford’s payroll topped out at one million dollars a week, a record high.
“They drew to their home city, as a magnet draws steel filings, workmen and women from all over southern New England and in fact from many towns hundreds of miles distant,” the Courant said. “They