Rural Economy in New England 269 



New Haven, and the effect which these enterprises may have had 

 in creating a market for farm produce is best considered in connec- 

 tion with the commercial activities of these towns. 



In many inland towns, it is true, there were enterprises already 

 established producing small articles of various sorts which were 

 disposed of in a market much wider than that of the local community. 

 Such were the buttons, tinware,^ clocks, combs, and other "Yankee 

 notions" which formed the stock in trade of the peddlers in their 

 annual trips to the Southern states. Yet the production of these 

 articles was conducted on such a minute scale, at this early date, 

 that no noticeable concentration of an industrial population resulted. 

 Towns like Waterbury, or Plymouth, or Berlin, in Connecticut, or 

 Leominster in Massachusetts,^ were not noticeably different, in the 

 opening years of the century, from the hundreds of other inland 

 towns which had no manufacturing enterprises. Their population 

 was not larger than that of many prosperous agricultural towns^ 

 and the presence in them of ten or a dozen industrial workers would 

 not have meant much to the farmers. Besides the articles enumer- 

 ated above, some towns made paper, some linseed oil,* others earthen- 

 ware and pottery^ in establishments or mills of much the same sort 

 as the grist-mills and saw-mills which were regular features of the 

 village economy. 



Hats. 



There were only a few branches of manufacture, some carried on 

 in inland and others in coast towns, which had become sufficiently 



' For a description of the tinware industry in Berlin and of the methods of mar- 

 keting this and other small manufactures see Dwight, Travels, II. 43-45. Also 

 Kendall, Travels, I. 128-129. A consideration of the early development of many 

 small manufactures in Connecticut towns, including tinware, clocks and but- 

 tons, will be found in Lathrop, William G. The Brass Industry in Connecticut. 

 New Haven. 1909. 



2 In Leominster 6500 dozen combs were produced annually by a labor force 

 varying from ten to twenty men. See Whitney, History of the County of Worces- 

 ter, p. 198. 



3 In 1810 the populations of Waterbury and Berlin were 2900 each; Plymouth, 

 where clocks were made in a few small shops, had 1900 people and Leominister 

 1600. 



* According to the statistics collected for the census of 1810 there were 19 paper 

 mills and 24 oil mills in Connecticut, 22 oil mills and ZZ paper mills in Massachu- 

 setts, and 3 of each sort in Rhode Island. 



*See Lamed, History of Windham, II. 365. These goods were also marketed 

 by peddlers. 



