New Book Illuminates How New Haven Builders Constructed City, Society

Who built the iron fence around the New Haven Green? Where can we still see traces of the work of William Lanson? And what was possibly the biggest party in the city’s history?

The Builder Book: Carpenters, Masons, and Contractors in Historic New Haven, published by the New Haven Preservation Trust, has the answers to these questions. 

And, at a talk at the Ives branch of the New Haven Free Public Library on Thursday night, co-authors Susan Godshall and Jack Tripp, went further, to draw a picture of New Haven’s builders before 1930 as not only tradespeople and craftspeople, but public servants who helped create the city of New Haven physically and socially.

Godshall, a board member of the New Haven Preservation Trust who, in the course of her career, worked at City Hall and Yale, began the presentation with a photograph of a construction site of a Yale dormitory on York Street from 1926. In the picture, ​“the scaffolding is still wood, still kind of higgledy-piggledy. It would never pass an OSHA inspection.” But there was a sign in the middle advertising the builder: the Sperry and Treat Company. 

Who were Sperry and Treat? 

The New Haven Preservation Trust’s Historic Resources Inventory (HRI) has details regarding about 5,000 buildings in New Haven, including the architect and the first owner. ​“However, a few of the entries list the builder, not the architect,” Godshall said.

Among those builders were Lyman and George Treat, Godshall noticed — father and son, who built their houses next to each other, at 836 and 840 Howard Ave., in the 19th century. ​“You can see that George Treat threw all of his masonry skills into the house,” Godshall said, pointing to a photograph of it. In 1886, ​“the house would have served as a marketing tool for the Treats’ masonry business.” Meanwhile, a house at 466 Orange St. listed the builders as Nehemiah Sperry and Willis Smith. They were among ​“New Haven’s top builders after the Civil War,” she discovered.

“I’ve been a student of New Haven architecture for a long time,” Godshall said. ​“But this was a hidden undercurrent.” Following her curiosity, she began looking for details about New Haven’s builders in the 19th century. She began to discover that the builders had rich lives, as professionals, public servants, and citizens, and that ​“their lives were intertwined,” by working on projects together, by friendship, and in some cases, by their families intermarrying. ​“I began to have that eerie feeling you get when you start making connections,” she said.

She pitched the idea to the New Haven Preservation Trust to make a booklet about the lives of New Haven’s builders from 1810 to 1930. The project ended up being bigger than that.

“Here’s what I learned from this project,” Godshall said. ​“Things were fundamentally different then. The construction industry changed for all time in the 20th century. Along came power tools, electricity, steel framing, and so on. Today, a building is put together by contractors and subcontractors who may not have worked together before. They order parts from manufacturers in far-flung places, shipped to the site on 18-wheelers. Their workers use forklifts and rivet guns.” But before that, ​“for thousands of years, every building on Earth was put together by hand, using muscle power and hand tools. The era covered in The Builder Book was the last hurrah in that long, long period when hand-crafted construction was the only option, and that seemed to me to be something worth writing about.”

Godshall enlisted Jack Tripp, now a senior at Yale, to dive into the archives of the New Haven Free Public Library, the Institute Library, and the New Haven Museum, where he ended up ​“doing the bulk of my research,” he said. Using biographies, scrapbooks, newspapers, and city directories, they were able to cobble together the stories of the lives of 23 builders. Godshall and Tripp divided up the writing. The project also warranted photographing 55 properties in New Haven where the builders’ structures still stood. NHPT member Jean Pogwizd took the pictures; ​“the weather, the direction of the sunlight, the amount of car traffic, and in some cases, whether or not it was garbage day,” Godshall said, ​“all came into play” in gathering up the necessary images.

The results give a human touch to features of the city of New Haven that we may have a habit of taking for granted. For example, in 1846, when the wooden fence around the New Haven Green was in need of repair, the city hired builder Nahum Hayward to replace it with a wrought-iron fence that is, in fact, the same fence in existence today. 

Likewise, the book reminds us that the work of now-celebrated builder, engineer, and Black entrepreneur William Lanson is still visible today: the stones he laid to extend Long Wharf into the harbor at the turn of the 19th century are still visible at low tide. 

The aforementioned Willis Smith’s own crowning achievement was the construction of the Soldiers and Sailors Monument atop East Rock. Its completion in 1887 was the cause for ​“the largest celebration in New Haven’s history” for its dedication. Ringing church bells at dawn ​“were answered by gun salutes from a warship in the harbor,” the book tells us. A long line of horse-drawn carriages conveyed citizens to the top of East Rock. A parade involved seven military divisions. All told, it was reported that 175,000 people attended the festivities, at a time when New Haven’s population was 80,000.

The Builder Book also portrays the builders in another light, as not only builders of structures, but of community. The most exemplary example was perhaps James Edward English, who began his work life as a carpenter, became wealthy, and ended up serving as a representative and senator in the state and national legislatures and was elected governor of Connecticut twice. He supported New Haven’s hospital and its school for nurses, and helped fund the development of East Rock Park. A fervent abolitionist, his declared his ​“finest moment in Congress was voting in favor of the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery, despite the opposition of all but a few in his party,” the book relates. He was quoted as saying that ​“I suppose I am politically ruined, but that day was the happiest of my life.” 

The builders, by and large ​“operated in a heavily networked community,” Godshall said, in a way that echoes much of how the city functions today. Like today, not everyone was included in that network. Tripp related how it was difficult to find records for builder Ettore Frattari, an Italian immigrant who wasn’t part of the other builders’ social network, even though the evidence from his extant buildings attests to his talent. Another intriguing outlier was Alice T. Washburn, who began a builder later in life, constructing houses in New Haven, Hamden, and Cheshire with an eye for fine detail that priced her operation out of the market when the Depression hit in the 1930s.

That said, for all the information Goshall and Tripp could compile — and the portrait of New Haven’s society they could create — both writers also felt the ragged edges of the limits of what they could know, the gaps they couldn’t fill in, the pieces of the story that were lost. The Builder Book was intended to partially address that question and call attention to what remained beyond their reach. Most tantalizing, they knew of the existence of nine other builders in the same time period they covered, but couldn’t find enough information to include them in the book.

“What is recorded in history is accidental,” Godshall said. ​“And didn’t someone write a song about that? You can’t always get what you want.”