Berlin, birthplace of the Yankee peddler
The official seal of Berlin, which adorns a sign in front of town hall, is a folk-art-type portrait of a man carrying an overstuffed rucksack with a pot and a pair of tongs hanging from its side
He’s a Yankee peddler, one of a breed of Connecticut-based itinerant salesmen who sold household goods door to door in the 18th and 19th centuries. Another sign, in nearby Deming Park, explains his connection to Berlin. The town is, the sign proudly proclaims, “the birthplace” of the Yankee peddler.
The pride is justified: the Yankee peddler holds a lofty place in Connecticut history. For more than a century, the state’s manufacturers depended on him to sell their products. He enabled companies to reach beyond local markets to customers hundreds of miles away. The Yankee peddler was as important to the growth of Connecticut manufacturing as were the rivers that powered the factory mills. (He has another claim to fame: he may be the source of the state’s mysterious nickname, the Nutmeg State. More on that later.)
Berlin claims bragging rights to
. the peddler because it was there that he first took to the road. In 1740, Edward and William Pattison, brothers who immigrated from Ireland, set up a workshop to make pans, tea kettles and other household items from sheet tin imported from England. They sold their products in nearby stores until the local market was saturated; Edward then began carrying his goods by horseback to distant towns. Voilà, the Yankee peddler was born.
People snapped up his tin ware. Compared to iron, it was lightweight and pretty. Compared to wood, it was durable and easy to clean. In the following decades, other Berliners, many others, followed his lead into the tin business, making not just kitchen items but also gutters, roofing materials, mousetraps, butter churns, stoves, and countless other products. Berlin became the tin capital of the country; by 1815, its tin companies turned out by one estimate about a million tin products per year.
Like the Pattisons, these companies sold their wares through Yankee peddlers, who were multiplying exponentially in response to the thriving tin industry. Some tin-ware companies employed dozens of peddlers, who fanned out across the country, hauling their goods on groaning carts and wagons along the country’s rutted byways. They were mostly young and ambitious, and they hoped that through smooth talk and sharp bargaining they could make enough money to one day start their own workshops or farms.
In the meantime, myriad other industries were sprouting up across Connecticut. Agriculture alone could not support the population. Yankee ingenuity, or more specifically, Connecticut ingenuity, intervened, producing what the historian Odell Shepard called a “bewilderingly miscellaneous” array of manufactured goods. Many products were specific to a particular town or region. Brass items, for instance, came from Waterbury; cigars from South Windsor; silver-plated ware from Wallingford; shoes from Wethersfield; locks from New Britain, and so forth.
Like Berlin’s tin pots and pans, all made their way to market on the backs, figuratively and sometimes literally, of the Yankee peddler. He carried the Connecticut name from Canada to the Gulf and from the Atlantic to the Mississippi, Shepard writes in his 1939 book, “Connecticut Past and Present.” The state’s industries thrived because of Yankee peddlers and vice versa.
Yankee peddlers became an institution. Yankee clock peddlers, who sold wares from the state’s burgeoning and world-famous clock industry in the Naugatuck Valley, gained particular renown. They covered every square inch of the country. In 1840, the peripatetic geologist G.W. Featherstonhaugh wrote that “in Kentucky, Indiana, Missouri and in every cabin where there was not a chair to sit on there was sure to be a Connecticut clock.” When the French historian and diplomat Alexis de Tocqueville visited America in 1831, he cited the Connecticut clock peddler as a symbol of the state’s prominence, despite its tiny size, in the life of the nation.
The Yankee peddler’s glory was not unalloyed. Over time, he developed a reputation, only sometimes justified, for shadiness. A famous 1830s and ’40s series of satirical sketches by the Nova Scotia judge and author Thomas Haliburton cemented that image in the public imagination. The series, called “The Clockmaker,” recounted the nefarious dealings of a clock seller named Sam Slick, from Slickville, Conn.
This brings us to the Connecticut nickname question. Among the misdeeds attributed to Yankee peddlers was selling fake, wooden nutmegs in place of extremely expensive real ones. True or not, it’s as good an explanation of the name as any, and yet another way the Yankee peddler made his mark on the Nutmeg State.