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The nineteenth century was farms, limekilns and one factory. In 1818 Benjamin Gilbert began weaving horsehair sieves in his cellar at Georgetown, on the town's southwest corner. The firm that became Gilbert & Bennett moved from hair to wire, and when the Civil War cut off its Southern customers it painted its surplus wire cloth and sold it for windows — the firm is credited with the first woven-wire insect screening. The railroad came through in 1852, with stations at West Redding, Topstone and Georgetown. The wire mill ran until the end of the twentieth century.
A century later the town went back for it. In 1887, at the urging of Redding residents, the state took the main camp ground as a memorial, and in 1888 it raised the granite monument: Connecticut's first state park. The log blockhouses and cannon at the gate came after. The bronze of Putnam on horseback at the entrance is the work of Anna Hyatt Huntington, who lived a few miles up the road.
Why People Visit Redding
People come to Redding for what is not here: no highway, no strip, no crowd. They come for a Revolutionary War camp you can walk alone on a winter morning, for sixty miles of trails, and for the hills that drew Mark Twain, Charles Ives and Edward Steichen out of New York.
