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The Armory was not only an industrial site. When the factory was built in the late 1790s, it was in the countryside, far from the homes and services of New Haven. A community grew up around the Armory, supported by Eli Whitney Sr. and the Whitney family. This may have been the first industrial village built in America, with housing and other amenities provided by the factory owner who also employed the residents.
Later, the community shifted north, growing into a larger village. Today, both the original southern Whitneyville and the larger settlement to the north are part of the town of Hamden.
The Site
In September 1798, on the same day he purchased the Todd’s Mill site for his Armory, Whitney also purchased the adjacent property, a 100-acre farm owned by Captain Daniel Talmage. This land lay across the new Hartford and New Haven Turnpike (now Whitney Avenue) from the Armory site. At the time, the property included three houses, a barn, and a blacksmith’s shop. Apparently, none of them were very nice: in January 1799, Whitney wrote to a friend that "The buildings are miserable."
However, Whitney needed somewhere to live, and he moved into the Talmage’s farmhouse, which lay very near the new turnpike. The small, dark, low-roofed building depicted in William Giles Munson’s The Eli Whitney Gun Factory may be that house. Whitney likely lived there until the boarding house was built.
Housing
As well as housing apprentices in the attic of the machining and filing shop, Eli Whitney Sr. had houses built for his older workers. Unmarried men lived in a boarding house, and married men and their families lived in a row of about ten homes along what is now Armory Street. At least six of these homes were built from stone, likely quarried on the Armory site.
The last of the Armory Street houses was torn down in 1912, but the boarding house still survives. The exact date of the house is unclear, but it likely dates from the final decade of Whitney’s life, between 1816 and 1825. It lies across Whitney Avenue and is now the headquarters of Preservation Connecticut.[LINK]
As well as rooms for the workers, the boarding house included a large kitchen, common areas, and a schoolroom for the apprentices. Eli Whitney may have lived there with his workers before his marriage in 1817.
The Barn
The c. 1816 Whitney Farm barn stands beside the boarding house on Whitney Avenue. The late 1810s were clearly a time of prosperity and building at the site, likely fueled at least in part by increased prosperity after government contracts during the War of 1812. The barn was a grand building - simple, but with stylish Palladian neoclassical detailing in the decorative arches around its doorways and the gable window.
The barn was home to oxen and horses used to transport goods and to maintain the Whitney farm, a small agricultural operation that fed the Armory workers. Many generations of animals lived there: the last draft horse only retired in 1930.
The oxen lived in a wing to the south of the barn which can be seen in Eli Whitney Blake’s elevation drawings of the barn. The oxen wing was replaced with a shed around 1904.
For many years, the barn was used by the New Haven Water Company. In 1976, they contributed the barn to the newly-formed Eli Whitney Museum, which operated out of the building until it was able to move across the street to the factory site in 1979. The barn remains part of the Museum and Workshop as a performance and event space.
In 2011, the 1904 shed that had replaced the oxen wing of the barn collapsed under heavy snow. In 2012, the Connecticut Department of Economic and Community Development funded a major restoration of the barn. The south wing was rebuilt to resemble its original structure, but with new interiors that accommodate the Museum and Workshop’s artist-in-residence.[LINK]
Later Whitneyville
The area around the Whitney Armory was the original Whitneyville, but as the community grew, the focus of the settlement moved upriver, where there was more room to build. Not everyone who lived there worked for the Armory: there were other factories and commercial businesses, as well as farms.
The Whitneys remained involved in Whitneyville. For example, in 1834 Henrietta Edwards Whitney, Eli Whitney Sr.’s widow, gave land and money to build the Whitneyville Congregational Church to serve the growing community.
The Whitneys owned much of the land along the Mill River. For at least a short time, the Armory also operated a second site in Whitneyville - “E. Whitney’s Upper Armory” can be seen on the 1856 Lake Whitney survey, on the east side of the river northeast of the church, while the original Armory site is labelled the “Lower Armory.”
The creation of Lake Whitney in 1861 reshaped Whitneyville. Roads running close to the Mill River had to be moved, as did buildings and bridges.
As New Haven grew in the later 1800s, Whitneyville became a suburb. Many more houses were built, and a tram line ran to the neighborhood from the city.