Before Danbury was the ‘Hat City’ it was ‘Beantown’
DANBURY — Jan. 6 was National Bean Day, and it might surprise some to learn that the city known for hat-making was once known for beans.
Before hat production earned it the name Hat City, Danbury was known by another moniker: Beantown.
There were various theories as to where the “unsentimental title” came from, according to “History of Danbury, Conn., 1684-1896” by James Montgomery Bailey and Susan Benedict Hill — one being “the pretty general disposition of the Danbury people in the past to cultivate beans.”
Danbury Museum & Historical Society Director Brigid Guertin said beans were “a common staple for many household gardens and farms” in Danbury’s early years.
Not only were they prolifically raised, but there was even a small, round, white bean known as “the Danbury bean,” according to Bailey and Hill.
In Danbury’s early years, beans were often carted down to Norwalk on wagons for trading.
“No Danbury load was complete without beans,” according to Bailey and Hill, “and … it was a common remark by those living on the road, when a team was passing, ‘Here goes a Danbury waon, for there is a bag of beans on top.’”
According to a 1902 NewYork Daily Tribune article, the soil in Danbury “seemed to be particularly adapted” to beans and they grew with “a luxuriance not equalled elsewhere.”
Archived journal entries of Horace Purdy, who lived in Danbury during the late-19th and early-20th centuries, show that a variety of beans were grown in Danbury, including string, lima, green, bush and pole beans.
The New-York Daily Tribune article also noted that a lawyer who attended court in Danbury when the railroad to Norwalk was being constructed once remarked that “he could not see any use for the railroad except to take beans to that town.”
Another theory about the “Beantown” nickname’s origin was that early colonists purchased the land that would eventually become known as Danbury from local Native Americans with a peck of beans.
While it is known that colonists started settling in the area in the summer of 1684 and acquired the land in 1685, it is not known whether beans were part of the transaction.
The colonists renamed the land — originally known as “Pahquioque” by the area’s indigenous people — Swampfield before it was decreed the name Danbury in October 1687.
National Bean Day falls on the day of death of 19th century geneticist Gregor Mendel, whose experiments involving bean plants helped form the basis of modern genetics.