This is the fifth profile in The City That…, a series about American cities that invented an industry, led the world in it, and then watched the center move on. We tell their stories plainly and with affection — what they made, what it cost, and what they still are.
The Founding
A thousand small bright objects of daily life came out of one valley, and the strange thing is the valley had none of the metal to make them. 
There was no copper in the hills above the Naugatuck, and no zinc. What Waterbury had was water to turn a wheel, a few men who knew how to work metal into buttons, and the nerve to bring the rest from somewhere else.
In 1802 two brothers from Southington, Abel and Levi Porter, came to Waterbury and joined three pewter-button makers named Grilley to form Abel Porter and Company. They melted down old copper kettles and stills, alloyed the copper with zinc, and rolled the result into sheet — the first brass rolling mill in the country.
They were likely the first Americans to make brass this way at all.
For a while it was a near thing. The early shop rolled brass by horse power and sold buttons, and the work was small. What made it large was a decision to buy what the valley lacked — not just the raw metal but the knowledge.
In the 1820s the Waterbury men brought skilled brass workers over from England, some of them smuggled out under cover of dark against the laws that forbade their leaving, and with English hands the mills learned to roll sheet and draw wire to a standard that could beat the British at their own trade. An empire was built here on imported metal and imported skill, on water and on nerve, and on nothing that came out of the ground beneath it.
The Height
From buttons the valley learned to make everything small and bright. Brass sheet became clock faces and clock works, lamps and lanterns when the country turned to kerosene, daguerreotype plates, coin blanks for the Mint, hinges and locks and bolts and pins, and — when the wars came — the cartridge cases and the artillery brass that an army runs on.
The city took a motto that said exactly what it thought of itself: Quid aere perennius? What is more lasting than brass? By 1864 a single machine in a Waterbury shop could stamp two hundred and sixteen thousand buttons in a day.
Three houses came to rule it — Scovill, the American Brass Company, and Chase — the Big Three, and together they made Waterbury the leading producer of brass in the world. At its peak the valley turned out something close to two-thirds of all the brass made in America. Scovill alone, by 1920, was the largest brass works in the nation, its payroll grown from two thousand to better than thirteen thousand in twenty years. The mills ran on immigrant hands — Irish first, then Polish and Lithuanian and Italian, packed into the tenements along the river, building a city of neighborhoods around the work.
And the valley learned to keep time cheaply. A brass house spun off a clock company, and the clock company learned to stamp a watch movement from sheet brass and sell it for a dollar. The Ingersoll Yankee, made in Waterbury, was the watch that made the dollar famous — millions of them, a timepiece a working man could finally afford.
When the Depression nearly killed the clock company, it was saved by a cartoon mouse: the Mickey Mouse watch, sold by the millions, that put thousands back to work in the worst years and carried the company toward the name it would take in the end, Timex. Waterbury made the small bright things the whole country reached for without thinking — the button on the coat, the clock on the shelf, the watch in the pocket.
The Cost
The brightest of those small things was paid for in a way the country did not see for years. The clock faces glowed in the dark, and they glowed because young women painted the numbers by hand with radium paint. They were hired for their nimble fingers, girls from the working-class neighborhoods, and to keep a fine point on the brush they were told to draw the bristles between their lips — lip, dip, paint — hour after hour, day after day. The company told them the glowing stuff was harmless. Some of them painted their nails with it for fun, and their teeth, to smile and shine going home.
It was not harmless. The radium settled in their bones and stayed, and it ate them from the inside. Their teeth loosened and fell out. Their jaws crumbled — the doctors came to call it radium jaw. Their bones broke under their own weight.
Frances Splettstocher died of it. Mildred Cardow and Mary Damulis died of it, young. The company denied for years that the work had anything to do with it, and moved to shorten the time a sick worker had to file a claim. One of them, Mae Keane, lived because she quit after a few months — she hated the gritty taste of the paint and asked to be moved — and even she lost all her teeth by thirty and carried cancer through a long life. She made it to a hundred and seven. The others did not get the years. The same valley that taught a nation to keep time took the time from the women who made the faces glow.
The Turn
What undid the brass was not one blow but the slow arithmetic of distance. The first thing to go was local ownership. In 1922 the American Brass Company was bought by the Anaconda Copper Mining Company out of Montana, and the men who ran the mills no longer lived above them or answered to the valley. A company run from a thousand miles away closes a plant more easily than a man closes the works his grandfather built. Then the river turned on the city: the great Naugatuck flood of 1955 tore through the low mills along the water. Then the materials changed — plastic and aluminum took the place of brass in a thousand household things, and there was less call for the bright sheet the valley rolled.
So the work left, plant by plant, decade by decade, shifted west and overseas where labor was cheaper and the metal was nearer. Anaconda passed to an oil company in the 1970s and kept moving the work away until the Connecticut mills went quiet. By the middle of that decade a newspaper could call Waterbury a ghost of what it had been. Scovill closed its Waterbury works in 1991. The last descendant of the American Brass empire shut in 2014, and the great brick works on Freight Street came down not long after. The metal that was more lasting than anything had outlasted the city’s hold on it.
What Remains
What remains is a working city that refuses to forget what it was. The brass is gone, but the brick stands — the great Second Renaissance Revival downtown the button money built, the clock towers, the flatiron Apothecaries’ Hall on Exchange Place, the mill buildings turned to apartments and shops, the Scovill complex itself reborn as a shopping center on the ground where the buttons were stamped. The Mattatuck Museum keeps the brass story whole, and Timex still keeps its offices a few miles down the road in Middlebury, the last living thread of the clock trade. The neighborhoods the immigrants built still hold their shape and their grit, fiercely proud of the hands that cast the country’s buttons and clocks and shells.
And the city has learned to face the harder parts of its own past. For most of two centuries the Mattatuck displayed a skeleton, donated by an old Waterbury family, that the museum called Larry. In 1999 the people of the city set out to learn who he really was, and they found him: Fortune, a man enslaved by a local doctor in the seventeen-hundreds, whose bones the doctor had stripped and kept for an anatomy school after he died, and whose widow had been made to clean the room where they hung. In 2013 the city did what two hundred years had not. Fortune lay in state at the Connecticut capitol, was carried to a full funeral, and was buried at last with his name. A city that made its fortune in bright metal proved it could also look at the dark and say it plainly.
Stand downtown among the brick and the clock towers and you can read the whole of it.
The first brass rolled by horse power from melted kettles, in a valley with no metal of its own.
The button on every uniform and the clock on every shelf and the dollar watch in every pocket.
The Big Three running the brass of the world out of one small Connecticut city.
The young women painting the numbers that glowed, and dying for it.
The work draining west and overseas until the mills fell silent.
And a city still standing on the river, still proud, still able to bury a forgotten man under his right name.
Waterbury made the small bright things a whole country lived by, and it made them at a cost worth remembering with them.
Waterbury cast the country in brass — the buttons and the clocks and the bright dials that glowed, and the young women who paid for the glow — and that is worth remembering.
Why Waterbury? From a single horse-powered mill in 1802, a Connecticut valley with no copper or zinc of its own became the brass capital of the world — buttons, clocks, the dollar watch, the casings of the nation’s wars — built on imported metal and imported skill, and paid for, in part, by the dial-painters who died making its clock faces shine.