The hinges left New Britain in 2001. The locks are still made a few miles down the road.
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This is the twenty-fifth profile in The City That…, a series about American cities that invented or defined an industry, led the country 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.
A Horse in the Cellar
In 1849 the brothers Philip and Frank Corbin went into business in New Britain, Connecticut, the town that would call itself the Hardware City, with a partner named Edward Doen and nothing to turn their machines. By the company’s own history, they bought a secondhand horse treadmill, set it in a cellar, and belted it to a grindstone, an emery wheel, and two lathes. Francina Corbin packed the goods and was paid for it. On the Fourth of July they shipped their first order, to a merchant in Ohio. It was ox balls, the metal knobs that capped the points of an ox’s horns.
In 1844 Philip Corbin had worked for a contractor in the shops of Matteson, Russell & Co., a lock firm descended from an 1839 partnership of Henry Russell, Cornelius Erwin, and Frederick Stanley. That firm became Russell & Erwin, and the Corbins’ shop became its rival. Money was one bond between the shops. Partnerships and family carried it from firm to firm, and by 1902 the same people held much of the stock in both lock companies.
New Britain had no large water power, and until the railroad came in 1850 it sat off the main routes of trade. Its shops made small things that took little metal and a great deal of handwork: hooks and eyes, saddlery, door bolts. A later historian counted twenty-four small metal shops in town in 1850. Twelve ran on steam, one on water, one on a horse, and the rest by hand.
New Britain Hardware at Full Strength
In January 1871 the borough voted to become a city, 521 to 520, over a protest about two ballots found folded together. Two years later the council adopted a seal with a beehive on it and a Latin motto credited to Elihu Burritt, a New Britain blacksmith who had taught himself languages while he worked the trade. Industry fills the hive and enjoys the honey.
The honey was hardware, and by the turn of the century the name had stuck. In March 1902 Russell & Erwin and its old rival, P. & F. Corbin, came under one holding company, the American Hardware Corporation. By the company’s own history, the two made nearly half of all the hardware of their type in the country. In 1904, by the federal manufacturing census, hardware was half the value of everything the city’s factories made, and New Britain produced about a sixth of the nation’s hardware.
Corbin later advertised its locks at Rockefeller Center. The city’s industrial museum counts five major industries in all, from builders’ hardware and hand tools to machine tools, ball bearings, and housewares. Fafnir, incorporated in 1911, made the bearings, and Landers, Frary & Clark made knives, then electric irons and coffee pots. In 1919, when the city welcomed its soldiers home, the cover of the Chamber of Commerce program called New Britain the Hardware Center of the World.
The Irish came in the 1840s, and Swedes and Germans in the same years; Poles came in numbers from the late 1880s, and Italians after 1900. The Poles built their own parish, Sacred Heart, and under a newly ordained priest named Bojnowski, who came in 1895, they built a newspaper and a school around it. By the 1930 census, nearly one in four people in the city had been born in Poland or had a parent who was.
In May 1943 Gordon Parks photographed the Stanley plant for the government. One of his pictures shows a woman wrapping finished bolts and butts for shipping. Butts are door hinges. In 1950 American Hardware alone employed 4,200 people in three New Britain factories.
And every day at noon, as two men remember it, the Stanley whistle blew. It was a steam whistle on the boiler house. Andy Trykowski, who worked at Fafnir and later at Stanley, lived a mile away, and to him it sounded as if it were blowing in his own back yard. “It was so loud,” he said. “So powerful!” Jonathan Scott, who grew up in the city and now chairs its industrial museum, remembers it the same way: the whistle at noon, and the Stanley trucks in the streets.
Where the Doors Went
The work left a piece at a time. In 1964 American Hardware merged with the Emhart company and took its name, and by 1970 the lock work had moved to a new plant in Berlin, the next town south. Landers, Frary & Clark sold its appliance business to General Electric in 1965, and GE made percolators on Ellis Street until 1969. Fafnir was sold to Textron in 1968 and again in 1985. It sent work to Newington and to plants in the South, and in December 1988 it left its Booth Street plant.
In September 2001 the federal Labor Department certified that imports had contributed importantly to the loss of jobs among the people making door hinges in Stanley’s Hardware Division. Its investigators found that production had fallen since 1999, and that Stanley itself had imported more door hinges in the first five months of 2001 than in the same months a year before. The president of the union local said the division’s work was in China now. The same year the old Corbin cabinet-lock business began moving to Illinois. That fall the boiler-house whistle came down, and Trykowski helped take it down.
I can follow some of the work to where it went. Why it went is harder. The hinges are the plainest case: the government’s finding names imports, and the company was doing the importing. A lock plant that moves only a few miles keeps the same workers within reach, so a search for cheaper hands explains it poorly. But a short move can have other reasons, and the records I have do not rank them. Landers once blamed slow work on its many-storied plant on Center Street and consolidated on Ellis Street; old buildings had a cost of their own. My reading is that for the short moves the buildings and the owners’ plans mattered more than wages. I cannot prove it, and the longer moves, to the South and overseas, suggest the wages mattered too.
What Was Lost
The city counted 83,441 people in 1970 and 73,840 in 1980, nearly ten thousand fewer in ten years. Highways and urban renewal reshaped the city in the same years, so not all of that loss can be laid to the factories. In 2003 the Environmental Protection Agency estimated that the departures of the 1970s and 1980s had left the city with more than 600,000 square feet of vacant and possibly contaminated land. Russell & Erwin’s plant at 102 Washington Street, built in 1887, was underused and in disrepair when the city bought it in 1993. A Walgreens opened on the site in 2003. Along Broad Street the Polish blocks decayed, and by the 1980s, a state history says, many people avoided the street. Tina Langevin, who worked at Stanley from 1981 to 1999, said she loved her job there and would always miss it.
Not everyone mourned the work. Ed Prendergast, who worked at Stanley in the 1960s, remembered his father drilling one rule into him: “Don’t get into the factory.” Many parents, he said, told their children the same, and their goal was to get the children out. The work, he said, was not pleasant. Some of what left New Britain was work its own families did not want for their children, and they said so while it was still there.
What Remains in New Britain
Stanley Black & Decker keeps its headquarters on Stanley Drive. Its last factory in the city, the tape-measure plant on Myrtle Street, began laying off its roughly three hundred workers in May 2026.
In Berlin, Corbin Russwin, now part of ASSA ABLOY, still makes door locks in the plant that took the lock work around 1970. And the city never stopped making things. In 2024 it counted 3,182 manufacturing jobs, and their average pay was well above the average for all jobs in town.
Four of the old Landers, Frary & Clark buildings on Ellis Street opened in 2025 as 154 apartments. The industrial museum is getting ready to reopen on High Street. In the late 1990s, a state history says, a new wave of Polish immigrants came to Broad Street, business people this time rather than factory hands, and opened shops. In 2008 the city named the neighborhood Little Poland, and it holds a festival on the street in the spring.
In a cellar in 1849 a horse walked a treadmill so that three partners could fill an order of ox balls for a merchant in Ohio. Ninety-four years later Gordon Parks photographed a woman at Stanley wrapping bolts and hinges for shipping. For years a whistle on the Stanley boiler house blew at noon, loud enough to carry a mile. It came down in 2001, the year Stanley’s door-hinge work left New Britain. A few miles down the road, in Berlin, they are still making locks.
New Britain hung America’s doors, and that is worth remembering.
Why New Britain? In 1904, by the federal census, New Britain made about a sixth of all the hardware produced in the United States, its locks and hinges among it, and it still calls itself the Hardware City.
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Charles Cranston Jett is an author and civic educator based in Chicago. A graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy (Class of 1964) and Harvard Business School, he served aboard nuclear submarines during the Cold War. He is the author of six books, including Super Nuke!, hosts four podcasts, and writes across his Critical Skills Blog platform on history, leadership, and the health of the American republic. In his writing he uses AI tools for research, editing, and occasional image creation; the arguments, the voice, and the final judgment are his. He and his wife, Dr. Nancy Church, live at Water Tower Residences, where they co-host the Chicago Salons.
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