Built and rebuilt on a river that kept taking it back
Naugatuck sits in a Connecticut valley bottom carved into 500-million-year-old Waterbury Gneiss, where mill factories and worker housing were packed onto the only flat ground beside the Naugatuck River. On August 19, 1955, hurricanes Connie and Diane sent that river 27 feet above its channel, killing eight people and destroying much of the downtown built there by Charles Goodyear's rubber industry.
A mill town built on the only flat ground
The ground under Naugatuck is old rock. The bedrock here is Waterbury Gneiss. It is a dark, banded stone. It formed more than 500 million years ago. It was squeezed and folded long before any river cut this valley into it. That valley floor is why the town exists where it does, and why it kept flooding.
Naugatuck grew up as a mill town. Its factories and worker housing were packed onto the narrow bottomland beside the river. That was the only ground flat enough to build on. The same flatness that made the valley good for factories made it good for water. When the Naugatuck River rose, it had nowhere to go but through the streets and shop floors that lined it.
By the middle of the 20th century, the damage had happened often enough. The state stopped treating it as bad luck. It started treating it as a planning problem. A Flood Insurance Study was compiled for the town. It laid out where the water had reached before and where it would reach again. Regional planners also published a study. It was called The Naugatuck Valley region: a regional planning study of conditions and prospects, 1955-1957. They prepared it for the Connecticut Development Commission. They tried to work out what the whole valley's mill economy would need to survive its own river.
The river rose 27 feet and took the town apart
The question got answered on one Friday in August. Back-to-back hurricanes, Connie and then Diane, dumped rain across the valley. The Naugatuck River rose 27 feet above its normal channel. It came through downtown Naugatuck the way it always had, but harder. Eight people died in the borough. Eighty-seven died across Connecticut. Homes were carried off their foundations. Entire blocks of the town center were destroyed in hours. People who lived through it called it Black Friday. The name stuck because there was nothing else to call a day the river took the town apart.
Vulcanized rubber built the wealth that got rebuilt
The reason there was a town center to lose was rubber. Charles Goodyear discovered vulcanized rubber. Years of failed experiments led to his breakthrough. Naugatuck's riverside factories made a product the whole country wanted. Boots, hoses, tires and belting came out of plants stacked along Water Street. The lowland was flat and next to a river. The river could power machinery. It could carry away waste. This is why the factories chose it. Later in the 20th century those factories turned out Naugahyde. This is a synthetic leather. It took the town's name into furniture stores and diners across the country. The valley floor that flooded also built the wealth that got rebuilt each time.
Factories and sewage poured into the same river
Downstream, that same river carried more than floodwater. For a century, brass mills, rubber plants and the town's sewage went straight into the Naugatuck River. Metalworking shops upstream dumped their waste too. The water that periodically rose into people's kitchens and shop floors was also the water hauling away everything the factories didn't want. Nobody upstream or down treated it as one problem. It was two separate uses of the same river. One was industrial. One was destructive. Both ran through the same channel at the same time.
Algonquian nations held this valley before the mills
Before any of that, this valley belonged to people the mills displaced. The Paugussett Nation held this ground. So did the Schaghticoke, Tunxis, Wappinger, Quinnipiac and Mohican nations. All were Algonquian-speaking peoples. Their territory ran through the Naugatuck Valley. The town's own name comes from their language. It named a river before it named a rubber company or a flood zone. What the mills and the water fought over for two centuries had already been someone's home for much longer than that.
The river still runs past the old mill ground, low and ordinary, until the next time it isn't.
Every person, building and event in this story opens into its own dig in the app — and it will dig the ground you are standing on instead, wherever that is.