One often gains a sense of how a town looked years earlier by the businesses that later occupy it.
In Wallingford, that rich past must have looked pretty steely. And it may continue looking that way for some time
The Quinnipiac River winds through the center of the town toward Toelles Road as it heads toward New Haven, bisecting the 40-square-mile community of 43,000 like an industrial spine.
Long ago, steel mills found it advantageous to use the power and geography of the river to forge metals for the industrial expansion of the country, said Doreen DeSarro, business recruiter for the town.
Today the steel business continues to be a major part of the industry of Wallingford, much of it concentrated in the Southwestern portion of town, still along the river.
The wire factory for NuCor Steel, which acquired the Connecticut Steel Corp. last year for $46 million, is one of the key vertebrate in that spine.
From its 210-person factory on Toelles Road, Nucor spits outs about 300,000 tons of wire rod and rebar and about 85,000 tons of wire mesh fabrication a year.
The products are used in mostly industrial applications, like stabilizing concrete, making fencing or even metal hangers.
It’s a significant economic driver for shipping in the region, buying steel billets to use in its wire rods from 12 countries. Much of that raw material is delivered from and shipped into New Haven harbor.
Nucor Steel Connecticut is a subsidiary of Charlotte, N.C.-based Nucor Corp., a 12,000 employee steel firm, one of the largest in the country.
Ametek Specialty Metals is another Wallingford metal maker. The 105-employee factory makes strips of nickel used largely by rechargeable battery-makers. Those batteries wind up in a variety of power tools, such as Black & Decker drills, and in batteries built by Sanyo and others for things like weed-wackers and other consumer products.
The factory opened in the 1960s as Metals for Electronics, and was owned at the time by Pfizer. It’s one of only a handful of factories in the world that rolls nickel and other metal powder to make solid metals, said Richard Mason, vice president of sales and marketing for Paoli, Pa.-based metals giant Ametek Inc., which now owns the plant.
It also makes specialty wire used in MRI machines made by General Electric and is exploring using its nickel to produce currency for a number of countries.
Another long-time steel company, North Haven-based Ulbrich Stainless Steel and Precious Metals, is even expanding it’s operations in Wallingford to help it grow.
The roughly 200-employee steel mill recently worked out a $155,000 agreement with the town to take over portions of three streets that run through its factory campus on Dudley Road. The company’s long-term plan is to build an additional, 12,000-square-foot warehouse on the property, and possibly, relocate its headquarters there.
Don Row, economic development officer for the town, said the expansion was great news for Wallingford. “This community has been long rooted in manufacturing and it’s been the policy of the town to embrace manufacturing.”
To put it another way: Even now, old line manufacturing like steel still makes a good backbone from which to grow. And Rowe said he’s happy to see that tradition continue.
Kenneth J. St. Onge is associate editor of the Hartford Business Journal.
