Burlington, Connecticut:
Six Businesses in a Town That Never Industrialized

Research conducted August 2026. Figures and website details reflect that date.

Burlington Never Got Its Factory, and Two Cities Made Sure It Never Would

Most Connecticut towns can point to the thing that built them. A river, a mill, a rail siding, a company that put up half the housing stock and then closed. Burlington cannot. Its story is the absence of that thing, and the absence was not an accident. It was purchased.

What the West Woods Were Before Anyone Farmed Them

The land was Tunxis hunting ground before English settlement. In 1640 the governor of Connecticut negotiated a purchase from the Tunxis of a large tract west of Hartford, incorporated in 1645 as Farmington [1]. That original Farmington contained what are now Avon, Berlin, Bristol, Burlington, New Britain, Plainville and Southington [1].

The western end stayed empty. Farmington's proprietors called it the West Woods and did not bother dividing it into lots until 1721 [1]. Even then almost nobody came. The first known settler in the northern half arrived in 1740 [1]. The terrain was the reason. This is hill country, and the brooks that run through it are small.

In October 1774 the scattered families up here were incorporated as the Parish of West Britain [1]. They joined the southern parish to form the town of Bristol in 1785, argued with it for twenty years about who should pay for the turnpikes, and split off as Burlington in 1806 [1].

The Century Burlington Stood Still

The numbers are almost comic. In 1850 the town held 1,161 people. In 1900 it held 1,218 [2]. Fifty years, fifty-seven people.

Everything around it was booming. Bristol built clock factories. Unionville built paper mills and a nut and bolt works. Collinsville built the Collins Company, which made axes and machetes for the world. All three drew Burlington's young people out [1]. Families had already been leaving for Ohio and Illinois since the 1830s [1].

Small industry did exist here. Burlington's brooks turned mills that made cider brandy, flintlock muskets, shingles, mantel clocks, satinet, carriages, coffins, needles and charcoal [1]. Copper came out of a deposit straddling the Bristol line, along with granite, chestnut for railroad ties, and ice in winter [1]. None of it scaled. The town's own centennial account in 1906 admitted that life here had barely changed since 1806 [1].

What survives from that period is farm buildings, not mill buildings. At the corner of Monce and Stafford roads, three farmsteads dating from 1794, about 1850 and 1874 were listed on the National Register in 1987 as a record of Connecticut agrarian history [3]. The 1794 house is a plain Colonial Cape. The nomination notes that this form was used by farmers of modest means in outlying places, who often had only their own labor to build with [3]. The barns are finer than the house. Their foundations are cut stone, dry-laid with precision, while the house sits on rubble [3].

On the green stands the Brown Tavern, a Federal building from about 1809 attributed, without documentation, to the architect David Hoadley [4]. Its 1972 National Register nomination contains one sentence that explains the middle of Burlington better than any other source: a state highway "has chipped away at the center and its green," leaving a small triangle [4].

How Hartford and New Britain Bought the Watershed

Then came the part that decided everything.

By 1909 the Hartford City Water Company had secured the entire watershed on Burlington's northern side, and the City of New Britain had bought up farms in the Whigville area to the south [1]. Neither city was in Burlington. Neither needed the land for anything but rain.

Nepaug Reservoir followed. Surveying began in 1911, construction in 1912, dam work in 1914. Water started filling in 1916 and the work was finished in 1917 [5]. The reservoir holds 9.5 billion gallons across the corners of Burlington, Canton and New Hartford, and the Metropolitan District has run it since 1930 [6].

Combined, those two watersheds account for more than a quarter of Burlington's total land area [1]. Farms became catchment. People moved away, and the Historical Society says so directly: buying the watershed reduced an already small population [1].

The census confirms it. Burlington peaked at 1,319 people in 1910, then fell to 1,109 by 1920 and 1,082 by 1930 [7]. That is a loss of about 18 percent. Over the same twenty years Connecticut grew by 44 percent [7]. While the rest of the state filled up, Burlington emptied.

What the State Fenced Off Next

The state took the middle. In 1923 Connecticut built a trout hatchery here, the oldest of the three it still operates [8]. Three years later it established a state forest around the hatchery for the express purpose of protecting its water [9]. That forest, renamed Nassahegon in 1942, covers 1,148 acres in the geographic center of town [9]. The hatchery parcel adds another 141 acres [9]. Sessions Woods Wildlife Management Area, off Route 69, adds 771 more [10].

The Depression left its own mark inside the forest. A transient camp was built there in 1934 with room for 250 men, who received board and 90 cents a week in return for 24 hours of work [9]. The Works Progress Administration took it over in 1936. It served as state forest headquarters until 1971. What remains is a foundation, a chimney, and a small stone jail [9].

Add it up and the picture is stark. As of 2006, 74 percent of Burlington was forestland and only 12 percent was developed [9].

The Fifty Years When Everyone Arrived

Nothing much happened until after the Second World War, and then everything did.

Burlington went from 1,846 people in 1950 to 2,790 in 1960, 4,070 in 1970, 5,660 in 1980 and 7,026 in 1990 [7][11]. By 2000 it held 8,190 [2]. That is four and a half times the 1950 figure in fifty years, in a town that had taken the previous century to add fifty-seven people.

What arrived was houses and schools, not employers. The one-room schoolhouses were consolidated in 1948. Lake Garda Elementary opened in the 1950s. Har-Bur Middle School and Lewis S. Mills High School both opened in 1965 [1]. Before Lewis Mills, Burlington teenagers went to school in Collinsville or Farmington [1].

Then it stopped. Between 2010 and 2020 the town added 218 people [2].

What Burlington's Economy Looks Like Now

Here is the whole thing in three numbers.

Burlington has about 1,675 jobs inside its borders and 5,783 residents in the labor force [12]. Roughly two thirds of working residents drive out of town every morning, and the average commute is 29 minutes [12]. Local government accounts for 623 of those jobs, more than a third of everything [12]. The second largest employment sector is private households, at 195 jobs, meaning people who work in other people's homes [12].

There are 740 active business registrations in town [12]. Most are one person and a truck. Commercial and industrial property makes up about 2 percent of the net grand list [12]. Almost the entire tax base is houses.

That is the room the six businesses in this article are operating inside. There is no industrial park here and never was. There is a state forest in the middle, two reservoirs on the edges, a fish hatchery from 1923, and one state highway threading past nearly all of it. Route 4 is where the town's commercial life actually happens, and it is worth noticing how short that stretch is.