Community Contribution

Original Source

In this inaugural chapter of our newest weekly feature, I’ll detail one of Naugatuck’s, or rather Salem's (as it was being called at the time) most unique “firsts.” Setting itself apart from the rest of Connecticut, our fine little borough voted to remain exactly that.

Beginning its earliest settlement in 1702 (Photo #1) as a plot of land that came to be called Judd's Meadow, it served largely as a cow pasture. In 1752, the area began to be called Salem Bridge, or more simply, Salem.

The population of Salem grew enough to make the building of schools (Photo #2) imperative. Six school districts were created before 1800, two others were set off before 1844, the Straitsville District in 1825, and the City District in 1830. The illustrated map (Photo #3) shows the district lines and the approximate location of the schoolhouses. The artist researched the borders using the 1867 New Haven County Atlas.

By 1844, Salem Bridge, since the opening of the post office in the center in 1834, frequently now called Naugatuck, had grown sturdily. It included within its twenty-eight square miles two churches, eight district schools, two through turnpikes, several general stores, and more than twenty-five shops.

The new postal system was growing rapidly, and the name Salem was already in use elsewhere within the state, causing confusion. Upon incorporating the town, a new name was chosen. A Native-American word meaning "one big tree" or "tree by the river where the fishing was good," became the town's new name - Naugatuck.

As early as 1867, a few voters presented a petition to transform the town into the borough, but it brought no action for twenty-five years. Yet it was increasingly clear, as the factories grew and working people poured in, that Naugatuck was outgrowing a town government geared to a semi-rural mode of life. Among the first signs of realization of this fact was the decision to build a Town Hall. Four and a half years from the day in 1878 when the citizens in town meeting voted to erect and furnish such a building, the Town Hall, (Photo #4) located opposite the green across from the Congregational church, was ready for use, equipped with its own water supply, sewage system, and gas lighting, offering a hall in its upper story capable of seating some 850 people, and laid out on its first floor with offices. Naugatuck, filled with civic pride, could now see itself in the role of a developing mill town.
(Photo #5)

According to another historian's account, dated 1946:

Naugatuck was established as a borough by act of the Connecticut legislature in January 1893. Unfortunately, the circumstances leading up to this change of status are nowhere recorded. Some twenty-five years earlier a few townspeople had proposed petitioning for a borough charter, but the motion had led to nothing. In 1895 the Naugatuck Citizen Souvenir hinted of gross abuses in management of town affairs in the late eighties and alluded to the valiant efforts of the sturdy citizens who defeated the corrupt machine. But we are left to guess that from the defeat of petty local bosses, whose very misdemeanors are not specified in print, arose the movement to have a new form of government.

To those of us for whom “the 80s” conjure up memories of New Wave, Alternative music and crazy hairstyles, it’s amusing to see this historian referring to a decade in the 1800s as the “late eighties.” What makes Naugatuck truly unique however, is not the “town affairs” of the 19th century…

The concentration of authority in the hands of the Warden and the advisory Board of Burgesses permitted more effective municipal planning than was possible under the system of town selectmen, but otherwise for years the change made little difference. Amendments to the charter in 1895 and 1897 extended the borough limits to include the whole town.

It was this coterminous extension that cemented Naugy’s place in state history as the first, and still the only consolidated borough-town...

History of incorporation: May, 1844; taken from Waterbury, Bethany and Oxford. Borough and town consolidated, 1895.
(Photo #6)