Becoming Unionville
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Union School District
The first mention of Unionville we see in print is an article in the Hartford Courant on July 3, 1833, about how Unionville was celebrating the 4th of July. When and how did Unionville get its name. Was the village always called Unionville? If not, what was it called and why did it become known as Unionville. Prior to 1830 the Unionville area of town consisted of a small group of farms in an area called Langdon’s Quarters after Simon Langdon who owned 210 acres of land that in 1763 stretched from today’s Lovely Street to Walnut Street. Langdon’s Quarters was part of Lovelytown which was named for the Lovely tribe, members of the Tunxis tribe, located in the Secret Lake area on the Avon/Unionville line. In the early 1800s today’s Unionville was known simply as the Union District as it had been since 1713 when Farmington was divided into twelve school districts. It wasn’t until a post office was located here in 1834 and the Unionville Fire District was established in 1893 that Unionville became official. Although there’s no written record of how Unionville got its name it most likely comes from being known as the Union District and the trend in Connecticut in 1800-1850 of using ville in the name of factory villages. Unionville’s first post office was in the Farmington Avenue home of its first Postmaster Edward Seymour pictured here in 1902 when it was owned by the Moritz family Unionville Fire District In 1890 Union Nut Company (later known as Upson Nut) lost eight of its buildings in a catastrophic fire that threatened the village center. Conservative estimates put the damage at $50,000. It turned out to be $150,000 worth of damage (just over $5 million in today’s dollars) and fortunately was confined to the buildings of the Union Nut Company though those were burned to the ground. That fire was undoubtedly the impetus for the establishment of the Unionville Fire District in 1893. Fire districts were able to tax and assess property owners, build and maintain an infrastructure for water, own property, establish bylaws, appoint officers, enforce fire safety rules and operate independently of the town. Because of the number of wooden buildings so close together fire protection was essential to Unionville’s economic survival. In 1903 the Connecticut House of Representatives passed "House Joint Resolution No. 416” which amended the Charter of the Unionville Fire District, defining the area of the Fire District. It was the first document to define what and where Unionville is, the railroad tracks shaping the village. From Borough to Town In May of 1921 House Bill 946 incorporated the Borough of Unionville and consolidated it with the Unionville Fire District. The election of its first officers was held in July of that year. According to historian Ellsworth Grant “The borough form of government is a curious, obscure anachronism, at once the most democratic and most authoritarian entity ever devised. It originated in England in the Middle Ages. He goes on to say that the Borough of Farmington was created expressly to divide one class of residents from another. The old, mostly affluent families living in the village of Farmington comprised one voting district. The other, larger district was made up of workers in the dozen factories of Unionville. Four miles and a social gulf separated the two communities; for years they bickered at town meetings. The east enders complained that Farmington was sinking into debt because of the cost of installing sewers in Unionville; the west enders opposed a political division because with fewer than 2,500 inhabitants it would lose representation in the Legislature. The Hartford Courant, describing the two voting districts as "an ill-assorted couple" in 1899, pointed out that while the east end was "old, quiet, historic, and agricultural," Unionville was "young, bustling, and manufacturing." Finally, the east enders got their way and set up a borough. Soon each section had its own town hall, water company, sewer system, and fire department. An uneasy truce prevailed. Finally in 1947 both communities buried the hatchet and agreed to consolidation. |
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