Collection Development -- Business History Collection

The Connecticut Business History Collection consists of over sixty collections that range in size from one item to over 2000 linear feet of records. The businesses represented in the collections depict Connecticut's evolution from an agrarian society to one that played a vital role in the Industrial Revolution, with materials including daybooks from grist mills and quarries of the early 19th century to annual reports and stock statements of companies whose dealings extended internationally in the mid and late 20th century. The majority of the collections are of businesses that made the state a leader in many industries in the 19th and early 20th century - textiles and silk, brass and hardware manufacturing, clocks and watches, heavy machinery and tools, with offshoots in the areas of banking, rubber manufacturing, knitting needles, surgical sutures, toiletries and thermoses. There are a handful of collections of industries that are more aligned with the state's gravitation to technologies of the late 20th century, including telecommunications and electrical and nuclear energy. The collection is almost entirely in English.

Highlights of the collection includes the records of the Southern New England Telephone Company, founded in 1878 and noted as the first public telephone company in the world; the Cheney Brothers Silk Manufacturing Company of Manchester; the Connecticut Yankee Atomic Power Company's Haddam Neck, Connecticut, plant, which produced nuclear power in the state from 1968 through 1998; and the Wauregan-Quinebaug Company of Wauregan, Connecticut, a textile factory that was a family business for almost 100 years. The business history collections are often used in tandem with the labor, Connecticut history, personal papers and organizational records, railroad and political collections.

The Dodd Research Center collects:

Administrative records, photographs, company annual reports and publications, worker records, maps and plans, and, on a limited and very selective basis, financial ledgers and journals
Records of Connecticut industries that are currently not represented in the existing collection, including but not limited to firearms, furniture, submarines, helicopters and automobiles

For inquiries about the collection or possible donations please contact the curator, Laura Katz Smith or (860) 486-2516.

This page is maintained by L. Smith