Date: Thu 02-Jan-1997

Publication: Bee

Author: KAAREN

Quick Words:

real-estate-utlities-history

Full Text:

The Coming Of Utilities A Century Ago Helped Transform Newtown

(with cuts)

Beepers, cellular phones, and e-mail have become such familiar means of

communication that it is difficult to comprehend what life must have been like

in Newtown in the early years of this century, before the installation of

modern utilities.

"Modern life is profoundly different than that of even our recent ancestors of

the last century," Town Historian Daniel Cruson said in an article "Utilities:

The Making of Modern Newtown," which appeared in The Rooster's Crow , the

newsletter published by the Newtown Historical Society.

"The conveniences that we call utilities, i.e. telephone, gas and electricity,

have created a world which my great grandfather could not have even imagined."

The first of the modern conveniences to appear in Newtown was the telephone.

The telephone was invented in 1875 and within two years the Bell Telephone

Company was founded. The Southern New England Telephone Company was founded in

1882, and that same year service first appeared in Newtown. Newtown, in fact,

was among the earliest Connecticut towns to have an exchange when, in 1882,

wires were strung over rooftops and attached to trees from a switchboard in

Danbury to 12 subscribers in Newtown. It was not until 1904 that a permanent

switchboard was installed in Newtown in what was then the Beers Block (now the

Gold Building where Flagpole Realty is located). Beers was described by The

Newtown Bee as the "...affable local manager of the Southern New England

Telephone Company." This meant that he oversaw the switchboard for the town's

telephone calls from the second story of the building, just over his store.

At the time this exchange was established, there were only 107 subscribers,

the names of whom took up less than a half column in The Bee , so Beers'

duties seem to have been light, allowing him plenty of time to tend his store,

according to Mr Cruson.

Telephone service was limited to the more densely populated sections of town

-- Newtown village and Sandy Hook center -- and it took more than 30 years to

penetrate the outer edges of town. The Bee noted in the February 9, 1912,

edition that the telephone company had extended its line from R.S. Wheeler's

place in Zoar to Thomas F. Barling's home in Great Ring. "The modern world had

made its first step into the far reaches of town," Mr Cruson said.

By 1917, telephone traffic was too heavy to be handled in the Beers Block, so

the exchange moved across the street to 40 Main Street, where Tim Holian's law

offices are now. Within two years the exchange had 435 subscribers on 58 party

and 81 single lines.

"One (operator) handled most of the average 2,450 calls each day, except

between 9 and 11 (am) when traffic was so heavy a second girl had to be put

on," Mr Cruson said. "Throughout the 1920s the telephone company repeatedly

published warnings that phone owners were not to call the operators after a

fire alarm went off to find out where the fire was. The phone, it seems, had

become part of the town's gossip network."

New Prefix Coming

Party lines were prevalent in Newtown until the 1950s. Each party on the line

had an assigned number of rings which signaled who should pick up the handset.

In 1952 the telephone exchange moved into its new brick building on Queen

Street where it still functions with automatic switches rather than a friendly

neighborhood telephone operator. In 1953 the 2,600 subscribers were converted

to a dial system with the prefix GArden 6- (later to be known simply as 426-).

Another prefix, 270-, was added in early 1984, and a third prefix, 304-, has

been assigned for future use.

The second major modernizing utility that came to town was electricity. It

came first to Sandy Hook, but it would take another 20 years before it would

eventually come to Main Street in Newtown. In 1894, about 15 years after

Thomas Edison developed the first reliable incandescent bulb, the two rubber

factories in the Glen were wired to receive electricity from a generator

powered by the water of the Pootatuck River.

Newtowners weren't in any hurry to accept electricity as the power source of

the future. In 1898, when fire-ravaged Dick's Hotel was rebuilt as the Newtown

Inn, there was no provision for electrical service. Instead, the huge building

was fitted for bottled gas.

The first indication that electric service would become available to residents

in Newtown came in January 1914 when the Danbury and Bethel Street Railway

Company canvassed the town to determine the feasibility of extending

electrical service to the village. The trolley company had gone into the

electric power business because it had excess capacity above what was needed

to keep its electric trolleys running.

Until that time, electricity for lighting on Main Street in Newtown apparently

had not been considered even remotely feasible. As late as September 1913, a

new lighting system relying on gasoline vapor was set up in the old Town Hall.

In that same month, gasoline street lamps had been erected in the borough.

"Obviously these capital expenditures would not have been made if it was known

that electric service would become available within a year," Mr Cruson said.

By late February 1914, the process of stringing wire from Danbury to Newtown

had begun. Thirty miles of wire consisting of three lines of ten miles each

eventually would run from eastern Danbury, over Stony Hill in Bethel and into

Main Street via Mt Pleasant Road. The October 16, 1914 issue of The Bee

finally sported the headline: "Current Turned on Wednesday Night for the First

Time...at the Store of R.H. Beers."

Within two months, the borough voted to put in electric street lights. The

power company agreed to supply 33 forty-watt lamps at $20 each, to provide all

poles and wiring, and to maintain a circle of lights around the flagpole. The

village promptly passed an ordinance that all poles in its jurisdiction had to

be painted green to reduce their intrusive appearance.

Gas Lights Common

Sandy Hook did not get electricity until 1922. In 1915, the Electrical

Engineering and Storage Battery Company had approached Sandy Hook with an

offer to supply power to its center but the Danbury and Bethel Street Railway

Company promptly obtained an injunction to stop the wiring project and protect

its franchise monopoly. Then it took seven years for the railway company to do

the job. The Hawleyville area got power in 1928 when William Upham, inventor

of the tea bag and a businessman with a national reputation, brought in

electricity to power his factory and tea gardens.

It isn't known when gas fixtures were first used in town, although they were

available in 1898 when the Newtown Inn was being built. (The inn was torn down

barely 30 years later and the Cyrenius H. Booth Library was erected on the

site.)

The old town hall apparently had been lit by gas for several years, for in

1913, the year before electricity arrived, what was described as a new gas

lighting system was installed in the building. This potentially explosive

lighting (bottled compressed gas distilled from gas oil) was replaced by

electricity shortly after the village was wired, but for residences, bottled

gas was still needed for cooking and, in the homes which had opted to do away

with dirty coal for their central furnaces, for heating, according to Mr

Cruson.

In the late 1920s, a new type of gas commercially known as Pyrofax was derived

from natural gas and processed in the mountains of West Virginia. It was

shipped to distribution stations all over the country in large steel tanks.

The distributor for Newtown was Tucker Brothers of Easton who continued to

carry compressed gas to Newtown until after World War II. In Newtown, the

agent for Pyrofax was Morris and Shepard, proprietors of the General Store on

Main Street, where a demonstration Pyrofax unit was set up to show potential

users the superior quality of the gas.

It wasn't until March of 1946 that Newtown learned pipelines would be laid

through town to supply gas to Newtown. Richard Gretsch, then assistant to the

president of the Danbury and Bethel Gas and Electric Company (which took over

for the failed Danbury and Bethel Street Railway Company in 1927) announced

that gas manufacturing facilities at Derby would be expanded and a 25-mile

high pressure pipeline would be run from Derby to Danbury.

The gas produced in Derby was created by a process of coal or coke

gasification, a method that was very polluting. In November 1949, Mr Gretsch,

then president of the gas company, announced that transmission lines which

carried pure natural gas from major oil fields in Texas to the Northeast would

be brought to Newtown, an improvement which was accomplished in 1952.

By that year, the paving of Newtown side roads was well underway and most

residents had acquired their first television set. From these beginnings, the

stage was set for the next stage of modernization: the electronic information

age.

For this, the town still relies upon electricity, however, a fact which is

made indisputably clear every time there is a major storm or other event which

causes a power failure.

As Mr Cruson pointed out, "This magnificent new age is vulnerable in only one

respect: the thin wire that transmits power into the user's home which, in its

periodic failure, allows the citizens of Newtown to occasionally `enjoy' the

rigors of the town's power-poor past."