Vernon-Rockville in the Twentieth Century

At the close of the nineteenth century, Vernon was a rural town of diversified farms with the small chartered city of Rockville, a booming textile-manufacturing center, at its heart. By the close of the twentieth century, the town had become a bedroom suburb within the expanded Hartford metropolitan region. During this time, the textile mills that had sustained Vernon's economy for over a century closed, farmland was subdivided for housing, and the automobile changed old patterns of working...