History of Stamford, Connecticut - Twentieth Century

Twentieth Century

On Memorial Day, 1901, a cannon from the USS Kearsarge was placed in West Park (now Columbus Park) as a memorial to Civil War veterans. Cast at West Point in 1827, the cannon had also been used on the USS Lancaster. The artillery piece sat in the park until 1942 when it was hauled away for scrap.

In 1904, the Town Hall burnt down. A new building in the Beaux Arts style was constructed from 1905 (when the cornerstone was laid) to 1907 in the triangular block formed by Main, Bank and Atlantic streets. The building was eventually named Old Town Hall and held the mayor's office until about 1961, when Mayor William Kennedy moved to the Municipal Office Building which formerly stood further south on Atlantic Avenue. Nearly all municipal offices were moved to 888 Washington Blvd. in 1988.

On February 19, 1919, at the site of the present Cove Island Park, in the Cove section of Stamford, the Cove Mill factory of the Stamford Manufacturing Company burned to the ground in a spectacular conflagration.

Stamford is the birthplace of the electric dry shaver industry. By 1940 Colonel Jacob Schick employed almost 1,000 workers at the Schick Dry Shaver Company on Atlantic Street.

Read more about this topic:  History Of Stamford, Connecticut

Famous quotes related to twentieth century:

    One of the peculiar sins of the twentieth century which we’ve developed to a very high level is the sin of credulity. It has been said that when human beings stop believing in God they believe in nothing. The truth is much worse: they believe in anything.
    Malcolm Muggeridge (1903–1990)

    The real passion of the twentieth century is servitude.
    Albert Camus (1913–1960)

    War is bestowed like electroshock on the depressive nation; thousands of volts jolting the system, an artificial galvanizing, one effect of which is loss of memory. War comes at the end of the twentieth century as absolute failure of imagination, scientific and political. That a war can be represented as helping a people to ‘feel good’ about themselves, their country, is a measure of that failure.
    Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)

    ... the nineteenth century believed in science but the twentieth century does not. Not.
    Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)

    Film is more than the twentieth-century art. It’s another part of the twentieth-century mind. It’s the world seen from inside. We’ve come to a certain point in the history of film. If a thing can be filmed, the film is implied in the thing itself. This is where we are. The twentieth century is on film.... You have to ask yourself if there’s anything about us more important than the fact that we’re constantly on film, constantly watching ourselves.
    Don Delillo (b. 1926)