When Samuel Tweedy moved from Dutchess County, NY to Danbury, CT, it was a fortuitous time to do something like that. Danbury was undergoing an economic expansion as part of a post-war boom, which gave him extra opportunities to gain access to trade and manufacturing that he never would have seen back in New York, which was a largely agrarian economy at the time.

Tweedy’s marriage to Ann Burr had both social and economic benefits, since Danbury was rather tight-knit as a community, and his having Ann for a spouse gave him an “in” where some of that was concerned.

One of Danbury’s biggest products was hats, and Samuel Tweedy established his own business with the assistand of his father-in-law. He immersed himself in the craft of making hats, and ultimately established himself as a man capable of building smaller-scale workshops dedicated solely to producing unfinished hat blanks, which could then be sold to hatmakers. Since an efficient shop could only turn out a few dozen hat blanks in a week, having several shops meant that Tweedy could turn out more blanks than anyone else. Tweedy’s shops also specialized in making hat blanks with fur linings. And Tweedy benefitted from protective tariffs, which reduced the number of British imports when it came to hats.

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