SCOVILL SUBJECT OF MUSEUM ORAL HISTORY PROJECT

The motif of an 1837 medal by Scovill Manufacturing -- found in the floor tiles of a shopping center built on the site of the old Scovill plant in Waterbury Connecticut -- is the symbol of a project to preserve an oral history by some former employees.

The Mattatuck Museum of Waterbury, in conjunction with the last remaining division of the old Scovill Manuacturing Company, now located in Clarksville, Georgia, are sponsoring a three-day project to record taped interviews of former employees, family members and anyone with special knowledge of Scovill.

On Wednesday, May 15, a panel of three experts on Scovill will talk on their eminences of the company. This program begins at 5:30 pm at the Mattatuck Museum, 144 Main Street Waterbury. E-Sylum readers in the area are welcome to attend. Admission is free.

Scovill is well known in the numismatic field for their production of virtually all of America's Hard Times and Jackson tokens, plus a large percentage of Civil War tokens. It produced blanks for minor coins for the U.S. Mint over a 40-year period until the Mint built a new plant in 1901. The firm also issued transportation tokens, sales tax tokens as it continued to make numismatic items into the 20 century.

The firm also supplied blanks for foreign government coins beginning in 1875 for Venezuela. This led the following year to to striking these coins intact. It minted 22 different coins for ten different countries. Collectors began calling Scovill the "Waterbury Mint" but there is no record the company used, or sanctioned, this term.

For 150 years Scovill dominated the brass industry, metalworking in New England and small metal products manufactured in America throughout its history. It is noted most for is manufacturing of metal buttons -- an early product of its founders right up to its demise for the most part in the 1980s -- and its military products during four American wars.

At its height it consumed a third of all the copper produced in America, combining this with zinc to make brass. It produced so many products in this metal it earned the name "Brass City" for Waterbury where its many plants were located..

Scovill's most noted creation is the production of 23,757 Columbian Exposition Award Medals. The U.S. Mint was commissioned to make these medals but exposition officials wanted raised lettering for the recipient's name on the reverse.

After creating the dies the Mint learned it could not create the raised lettering. It commissioned Scovill, who solved the problem with insert dies, requiring a small staff of engravers, clerks and pressmen 18 months to strike the full number required.

Scovill also created its own Centennial Medal with the same raised lettering for recipients' names in 1902.

The Oral History project is being conducted under the direction of Cathy Sigmon, current Scovill Archivist. Dick Johnson was project manager.

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