Banking

The history of banking in Connecticut can be studied through the numerous institutional histories of individual banks and the reports of the Banking Commissioner, both categories of publication outside the purview of this bibliography. There are, however, a couple of surveys of the field and a few other items that researchers might find helpful.

Bassett, George J. “Bank Closings in Connecticut.” Connecticut Bar Journal 16(July, 1942)3:208-22. There were fifty mergers or liquidations between 1930 and 1933. The author was State Bank Commissioner.

Harwood, Pliny LeRoy. “Savings Banks.” In History of Connecticut in Monographic Form. Edited by Norris Galpin Osborn. New York: States History Company, 1925. The author was a bank executive and president of the Savings Bank As­sociation of Connecticut, 1921-22. This is a history, 1819 to World War I, of the institutions strictly defined as savings banks.

Hincks, William T. “The Banks and Banking Industry of Bridgeport.” In The New England States. Edited by William L. Davis. Boston: D. C. Hurd (1897)II:969-77. This is especially the story of the Bridgeport Bank (est. 1806), now the Con­necticut National Bank.

Morrison, Grant. “Isaac Bronson and the Search for System in American Capital­ism, 1789-1838.” Doctoral dissertation. City University of New York, 1974. The emphasis in this work “is not on Bronson’s entrepreneurial activities, but on his role as a business conservative attempting to combat what he saw as a deepening instability in American economic life in the early decades of the nineteenth century.” (from the abstract) Bronson was the principal force in the founding of the Bridgeport Bank.

Osterweis, Rollin G. Charter Number Two: The Centennial of the First New Haven Na­tional Bank. New Haven: First New Haven National Bank, 1936. This is a com­missioned history of the oldest bank in the national banking system. It is in­cluded because it was written by a professional historian who pays attention to Connecticut banking generally and to the national banking system in par­ticular.

Parsons, Francis. A History of Banking in Connecticut. Tercentenary pamphlet XLII (1935). The author was a lawyer, an amateur literary historian, and an execu­tive of the Hartford National Bank and Trust Company. Connecticut’s first bank charters were issued in 1792, and Parsons tells their stories, along with those of other banks, down to 1935. His last pages represent a banker’s view of the calamity of 1930-33 and should be read against Bassett, above.

Swift, Rowland. “Commerce and Banking.” In Memorial History of Hartford County. Edited by J. H. Trumbull. Boston, 1888. Begins in 1636, with emphasis on commerce, obviously. But since Hartford was the center of banking in the state, this forty-page piece says much about the history of the subject generally.

Woodward, Joseph G. “Currency and Banking in Connecticut, 1635-1838.” In The New England States. Edited by William L. Davis. Boston: D. C. Hurd, 1897. Mostly about public finance. "For a quarter of a century the institution had exerted an influence not only in financial matters but in politics and the church, that has never been paralleled in the history of the State, and a repeti­tion of which from changed conditions long ago ceased to be possible." (p. 124)

Woolsey, Theodore S. “The Old New Haven Bank.” Papers of the NHCHS 8(1914):310-28. New Haven’s first bank, established in 1797. Much economic and financial matter for the early and mid-nineteenth century.