This library guide was created for the library exhibit on the 1924 graduates of the Danbury Normal School, now known as Western Connecticut State University. We are focusing on the graduates who were from Danbury. We hope to expand the collection of biographies of the graduates to include students from other towns in the future.
While researching the Danbury students, we found that the majority of their families had ties to the Danbury hatting industry. The early 20th century was the heyday of the industry in Danbury, "the Hat City." There were hat factories scattered throughout the city, from large manufacturers of the raw forms to establishments employing finishers and trimmers doing piecework to fill orders from retail establishments.
There were many sources used to compile the information for this guide and the accompanying exhibit. The major part of the biographical information collected here in the student biographies is from the Ancestry database including U. S. Federal Census records, city directories, death, marriage and birth records, Find a Grave links.
WCSU Archives & Special Collections
Obituaries and articles from newspapers: the Danbury News Times, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle.
School Days: Schoolhouses and schooling in old Ridgefield by Jack Sanders, Red Petticoat Press, 2023.
Special thanks to the Danbury Museum and Historical Society for lending us photos for the exhibit display.
The rise of public schools – also known as common schools – in the 19th century revealed the urgent need for qualified teachers. Education reformers began pressing legislatures to follow the lead of Prussia and France, which were establishing “Ecole Normale” (translated as “common schools”) for the state-sponsored (free) training of teachers. The first “normal” school was established in Lexington, Massachusetts in 1839 and the idea spread.
Town boosterism, not a commitment to education, is credited with the location of Normal schools throughout the United States in the second half of the 1800s. Towns competed fiercely for the prestige. In Connecticut, the first normal school was established in New Britain. Willimantic won the right to have the second school with New Haven following soon after. Danbury and Waterbury (Bridgeport declined to participate) engaged in a bruising battle fought in the state legislature for the placement of the fourth - and last – Normal school in the state. Danbury won and the seeds of the state university system had been planted.
For more information see: Ogren, Christine A. The American State Normal School. New York, Palgrave MacMillan, 2005;
Danbury Normal School was established by the State legislature in 1903. Normal school students attended their first classes on the top floor (attic) of the Danbury High School building on Main Street.
Land for the new school was donated by Alexander White, a native of Danbury. He had a very successful business importing furs to be used in the hatting industry. He donated several acres of his farm for the school on what is now White Street. The new building, now known as Old Main, was built in 1904 and classes moved over from the high school. The principal of Danbury High School, John R. Perkins, became the first principal of the new Normal School.
WCSU, https://archives.library.wcsu.edu/omeka/exhibits/show/pioneers/normal
