Barnum Richardson Company
| To understand the origins of Trinity Church, one needs an understanding
of the company for which the village of Lime Rock was a "company
town". That the two names of this company are the same two names
as those of the two founding families of Trinity is anything but
accidental.
This summary is in part adapted and abridged from the collection description of the Barnum Richardson Company papers in the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center of the University of Connecticut Libraries. The original of this description can be found at http://www.lib.uconn.edu/DoddCenter/ASC/findaids/Brichard/biography.htm. We have supplemented it from our own research into the company. A Brief History of Barnum Richardson Company:It seems improbable today to consider that the company that at its peak owned eight blast furnaces (exercising a significant influence over 13 others as well) and was a major fabricator of railroad car wheels was started by a farmer/merchant from Dutchess County (and Boston Corners, Columbia County), Milo Barnum, and his son-in-law, Leonard Richardson, who had relocated to Lime Rock. There, they had started Barnum, Richardson and Company, a small general store with a foundry operation for re-melting pig iron and casting it into clock and sash weights, plow castings, and other small items useful in a rural area. In the 1840 census, Milo Barnum describes himself as a "farmer." William H. Barnum, the son of Milo, born in Boston Corners, NY (at the time of his birth, however, part of Massachusetts), joined the firm in 1840, and around that time the firm diversified into making railroad hardware for that new industry -- an industry that, in those years, was as much a glamorous growth industry as the "dot com" industry was in the 1990s. Their first significant customer in this area was the Boston and Albany Railroad. The decision to diversify in this direction was a good one: not only because railroading was the growth industry of the era, but of particular importance, Salisbury iron withstood the demands placed on railroad wheels very well. The firm "prospered because of the increasing demand for this high quality iron, and owned a number of the town's manufacturing concerns and most of its housing." Indeed, Lime Rock was very much a company town. Along with housing, the company provided a community center (called the Casino -- the term had no gambling connotations at the time and was concerned largely with civic betterment), two company stores, a company brass band, and a baseball team and ball field. In 1872 they were to provide a "company church" as well. This is not to say that they enforced a religion on their work force; indeed, William H. Barnum was a substantial financial supporter of area Roman Catholic churches because many of his workers were of that denomination, and a Methodist chapel was situated directly across the street from the elder Barnum and Richardson homes. In a series of events between 1852 and 1864 Milo Barnum retired, the company purchased the Beckley and Forbes blast furnaces as well as a foundry in Chicago, founder Leonard Richardson died, and the company was reorganized as a joint stock company with William H. Barnum as president and general manager. In 1870 another foundry was built in Salisbury, in 1872 Trinity Church (the new company church) was established, and the East Canaan #3 furnace ("The Furnace in the Field") was built. In 1873 a new wheel foundry was built in Chicago. By 1881 Barnum Richardson Company owned eight blast furnaces in Connecticut's Northwest Corner, as well as the Ore Hill Mine. The salutary effect of his "company church" was likely responsible for Barnum's decision ten years later to donate the then-large sum of $500 to build a Roman Catholic church in Cornwall Bridge, the site of another Barnum Richardson furnace. In an 1883 controversy reported in the New York Times, Barnum and Richardson refused to comply with the demands of other area Protestants that they fire all their Catholic workers because the local Roman Catholic priest had been so presumptuous as to erect a crucifix on the lawn at St. Mary's RC Church in Lakeville. This was clearly a vexing problem for Barnum, for, as the Times reported, those calling on him to request that he fire much of his workforce included former Governor Holley -- certainly a name well known not only in political circles, but also as the scion of the Holley iron company (which Barnum and Richardson had eclipsed), and, as well, the head of the most socially prominent family in the Town of Salisbury. In that series of articles in the Times it was revealed that Barnum had personally donated between $6000 - $8000 to St. Mary's, further illustrating a partiality toward organized religion -- regardless of the denomination -- that went well beyond serving as Senior Warden of Trinity Church. William H. Barnum, following his career in the iron industry, the railroad industry, and in politics (he was a Congressman and US Senator from Connecticut, and was the longest serving Chairman of the Democratic Party to date) died in 1889 of acute nephritis. His funeral drew the largest crowd ever to attend a service at his own Trinity Church, and he was buried in Lime Rock Cemetery. The development of the Bessemer process for making steel -- interestingly, a process brought to the United States by a Holley descendent -- along with the growing popularity of steel railroad cars, which were too heavy to use cast iron wheels, spelled the end of Barnum Richardson as an entity based in Lime Rock. By 1920 the company here was had run off its inventory of iron ore, charcoal, pig iron, etc., and that year the company's local real estate was purchased by the Salisbury Iron Company, said to represent the former Holley family interests. Fred Warner provides a date of April 28, 1920 when the first mortgage for these assets was filed with the Guaranty Trust Company. The final quitclaim deed for the Lime Rock properties, to Alfred Stone, the developer who gradually sold off the Lime Rock properties, was dated January 21, 1926. While local folklore had it that the Barnum and Richardson Company was completely defunct by 1920, this is demonstrably not the case. The New York Times of April 1, 1928 recounts the estate settlement for William Milo Barnum, son of William H. Barnum, who died on October 5, 1926. The appraisal of his estate included $168,039 in stock of the Barnum and Richardson Company. Especially considering that William Milo was the son who became a Wall Street lawyer, and not the one who managed the family business, it is clear that Barnum Richardson was still very much a going concern well after the operations in the town of Salisbury and the Northwest Corner area had shut down. We do not know the date when other Barnum and Richardson businesses, such as the company's works in Chicago and the iron ore mine in the Lake Superior iron range, were disposed of. Interestingly, the oldest Barnum Richardson Company entity in Northwest Connecticut that has survived in original form is Barnum's first experiment in taking a major role in supporting organized religion: Trinity Church in Lime Rock. Barnum stressed at the time it was built that his company church was to be a church of the entire Lime Rock community, regardless of social position, and to this wisdom, Trinity most likely owes its survival. The University of Connecticut have identified the following companies associated with Barnum Richardson (we conclude that this is a partial list at best):
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