Like many New England coastal communities possessing good natural harbors, New Haven emerged from the first quarter of the nineteenth century as an important port with an established mercantile based economy. However, between 1830 and 1850, the principal focus of the city’s economy shifted from mercantilism to manufacturing. This shift in the economic base of New Haven was spurred by the construction and opening of the Farmington Canal which connected the New Haven harbor and Connecticut River at Northhampton. Though the canal itself failed to meet its commercial expectations, it did create a new era of optimism and was important for the growth of New Haven’s inland commerce. Aided by the introduction of the railroad and the proliferation of both the number and types of mass production machinery, many of the small, semi-traditionally organized local carriage, gun, clock and other hardgoods producing shops of the 1820’s had become medium sized factories utilizing modern methods of production and distribution. By the early 1850’s New Haven boasted over 150 of these factories employing several thousand workers.

The second half of the nineteenth century saw the full flowering of New Haven as a major, manufacturing based commercial and transportation center. From 1850 to 1900 the number of factories in the city more than quadrupled. The scale of many factories also increased significantly. Huge new industrial complexes employing as many as a thousand workers apiece were constructed for a number of the successful firms, such as Sargent and Company (hardware), the Winchester Repeating Arms Company (firearms), and the Strouse Adler Company (corsets). New industries, including piano and rubber goods manufacturing, emerged and prospered along with the city’s more established carriage, firearms, clock and hardware companies. The local railroad system, which had initially developed as intricate web of private lines all converging at New Haven, was consolidated under the single, large corporate umbrella known as the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad. Under the auspices of this corporation, which maintained its headquarters in New Haven, extensive terminal, repair and storage facilities were contracted along the western side of the city’s harborfront.

New Haven’s emergence and continuing development as one of the region’s principal industrial centers sparked a dramatic and ever accelerating growth in the number of its inhabitants. Between 1830 and 1900, the city’s population increased more than tenfold, from 10,000 to 108,000 citizens. New residential neighborhoods developed in response to the tremendous pressure that this population explosion brought to bear on housing. One of the largest and most significant of these neighborhoods was the area which today forms the Orange Street historic District.

Between 1830 and 1850 most development occurred in the southernmost portion of the district along streets such as Lincoln, Bradley, Eld, Trumbull, and lower Orange.  These streets lay closest to the city’s established early nineteenth century urban core and abutted the emerging industrial districts energized by the Farmington Canal along Audubon Street and northeast of the district.  Land records and city directories indicate that the development of this portion of the district was initially fostered by developers such as Joseph Ball, Gerald Hallock, Everard Benjamin, and Henry Eld.  These men purchased and subdivided most of the land along these streets and sold individual house lots to local artisans and craftsmen who built most of the houses in this area.

Prior to 1850 the land which lay between State and Orange Streets from Clark Street north to Eagle Street had formed a 112-acre farm owned by one of the city’s most prominent business and civic leaders, Abraham Bishop.  Following Bishop’s death in 1844 this extensive farm was apportioned to the families of his heirs. In the early 1850s the heirs subdivided their respective allotments into small building lots for sale and development.  Bishop’s heirs also laid out many of the district’s extant streets, which continue to bear family surnames such as Bishop, Clark, Nicoll, Foster, and Edwards.

The subdivision and sale of Bishop’s farm greatly facilitated the relatively rapid northward expansion of residential construction in the area during the ensuing decades. Nineteenth century land records and maps indicate that by the late 1860s significant housing concentrations were already established along Clark, Pleasant and Humphrey Streets, as well as along the eastern end of Bishop Street. By the 1870s, significant residential development had pushed even further northward along the eastern side of Bishop, Edwards and Lawrence Streets, as well as along Nash, Nicoll, and Foster,  Aided by the introduction of horsecar railways through the area and the growth of industries abutting the northeastern boundary of the region in-fill construction continued to take place throughout the district as a whole during the remaining decades in the century.  By the turn of the twentieth century the district had emerged as one of the city’s most densely built-up residential neighborhoods.

City directories dating from the second half of the nineteenth century indicate that throughout this period the district continued to develop, from a socioeconomic standpoint,

as a predominantly middle-class residential quarter.  While a number of prominent and wealthy individuals such as industrialists William Converse and John Anderson built and occupied large, fashionable residences along the district’s southern fringe, the majority of the districts population during this era were wither employed as skilled laborers, builders, middle management businessmen, and independent shopkeepers.