A winter chapel that grew into a clock empire
Bristol, Connecticut began as New Cambridge, a winter congregation granted to farm families scattered across Fall Mountain and Chippens Hill in 1742 so they need not cross exposed ground to reach church in Farmington. Incorporated as Bristol in 1785, it grew around Gideon Roberts's horseback clock trade into a manufacturing city, later a city in 1911, and home to ESPN since 1979.
Scattered farm families win a winter chapel of their own
By 1742, families scattered across the slope of Fall Mountain and along Chippens Hill had had enough of the trip. Getting to church in Farmington meant crossing high, exposed ground in the snow, sometimes for hours each way. They asked the Connecticut Colony General Court for permission to hold their own winter services, closer to home.
The court said yes, but only for the cold months. It was a small concession, but it was the first crack. Within two years the settlers pushed further and won a full ecclesiastical society of their own, free of Farmington's parish year-round. They called it New Cambridge.
The scattered farms had no single village center. The General Court sent a committee to find one. They chose a rise now called Federal Hill. The first Congregational church went up there. It gave the scattered farms something they had lacked: a middle.
A farmer straps clocks to a horse and rides
In 1785, New Cambridge incorporated as its own town. The settlers named it Bristol, after the English port. Among its wealthiest men was William Jerome I House, who had arrived in 1740 while the land still belonged to Farmington. The 1790 census lists him as the only person in Bristol who enslaved another human being. His house still stands at the southwest corner of Warner Street and Jerome Avenue. It sits about a mile northeast of here. It is a five-bay colonial saltbox with a center chimney and a doorway framed in fluted pilasters.
The town's fortune came from a different kind of independence. Around 1790, a farmer named Gideon Roberts started making wooden movement clocks by hand. He strapped them to a horse. He rode the roads of Connecticut, New York, and Pennsylvania selling them door to door, with no factory and no partners.
His sons joined the business as they grew, and production climbed. Within a generation, nearly every dollar and every skilled hand in Bristol was tied to clockmaking in some form. Clockmaking pulled in brass foundries, spring makers, and hardware shops. It turned a hillside congregation into a manufacturing city.
A clockmaker's working life traces the trade's growth
The trade Gideon Roberts started needed hands to keep it running. Ephraim Downs was one of them. He took up clockmaking in Bristol's shops as the industry grew past one man on horseback into a network of mills and foundries. He spent his working life in the trade. He died in Bristol in 1860. By then the town's wooden clocks had given way to brass ones. They sold by the thousands. He never founded a company that made his name famous. He was one of dozens who made the industry possible. His death marked how far the trade had come from a farmer's saddlebags.
A collapsing bridge drowns eleven workmen in a storm
A storm hit Bristol on the night of February 7, 1896. It swelled the Pequabuck River. The river tore through East Bristol. A bridge over the river gave way just after 9 p.m. About twenty workmen were on it or near it when it collapsed. They went into the current together. Eleven of them drowned.
The bridge had carried the town's workers to and from the shops that clockmaking and its related trades had built. The industry that gave Bristol its wealth had also built the roads and crossings that workers depended on every day. On this night, one of those crossings failed. It cost eleven lives.
A drowned chief's legend haunts a nearby lake
Local legend tells of the chief of the Tunxis people. He drowned himself in Lake Compounce, about two miles from here. He had signed away tribal land to the settlers. These settlers would found towns like Bristol. The story is told as local lore, not as documented history. It says his spirit lingers at the lake to this day. People blame him for strange sightings and unexplained trouble on its shore. Whatever the truth of the legend, the land beneath New Cambridge's farms and Bristol's clock shops belonged to someone else first. The terms of its transfer were never equal.
A clockmaking hillside becomes a broadcaster's satellite hub
Bristol incorporated as a city in 1911, more than a century after the clock trade began. The industries kept changing. Lake Compounce opened in 1846. It is still running today. It is the oldest continuously operating theme park in the country. ESPN set up its headquarters in the town in 1979. This turned Bristol into a hub for a different kind of national reach. This time it was broadcast instead of peddled by horseback. The hillside that once held a scattered winter congregation now holds a media company's satellite dishes. A two-hundred-year-old amusement park stands within a few miles of it.
The rock under Fall Mountain is still the same gneiss the first settlers built their winter chapel on.
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.