S Ardis Abbott

Vernon-Rockville in the Twentieth Century S Ardis Abbott

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, shopping, and socializing.

Vernon-Rockville in the Twentieth Century combines unique and previously unpublished images with detailed and compelling text in an informative history of Vernon and Rockville during the turbulent years of the twentieth century. Highlights include photographs of rural Vernon before suburban expansion, the devastation caused by the 1938 hurricane, Rockville before and after urban renewal, and the consolidation of the two separate rural and urban parts of the town into a more unified community with a very different economic base.