Oxford's Record: The First 175 Years - by Dorothy DeBisschop - page 33

"The Valley on the easterly side of the Housatonic river, from the Five Mile Brook to and for some distance above Zoar Bridge, was known for more than half a century as Punkups, as it still is by some of the older people of the surrounding territory. Eight Mile Brook was the dividing line between the towns of Oxford and Derby, and in consequence the people south of the line went to Derby to vote, while those north of the line voted in Oxford and as in the earlier times the lines of demarcation were not always closely observed, some took their choice of a voting place and went to the nearest.
"Derby was a Whig town, while Oxford was Democratic, and this with other reasons was incentive enough to incite a sterling old Democrat named Lum, familiarly known as 'Uncle Harry,' to engineer a set off that should put all of Punkups and part of Squantuck into the town of Oxford.

Lum arranged for a bill to be introduced into the Connecticut General Assembly, to allow Oxford to annex the areas in question. The bill was passed May 1, 1844.

    "Punkups was at that time a flourishing neighborhood. There was a woolen mill, a foundry, an axe factory, an auger factory, a bellows factory, a cotton mill, a sawmill and a tannery. The tannery had its own primitive arrangement for grinding bark. A huge circular block of granite was leveled on the surface and over the bark, laid on this, a granite wheel about a foot thick and five feet in diameter was rolled to crush the bark, just as apples were crushed in the ring mill of that day. A ring mill was a circular trough into which the apples were put and a circular disk made of wood, weighing some hundred pounds, propelled by a horse hitched to the end of a pole that went through the center of the wheel as a shaft, crushed the apples. As the season for making cider was a short one the ring mill in this case was available the larger part of the year for crushing bark for the tannery.
    "But the progress of events changed Punkups. The old industries mostly languished and died out.
    "About 1840, two brothers, Webb and Beach Downs, from Monroe entered on the scene. They had built by contract a breakwater at Black Rock, near Bridgeport, and had thereby cleared three or four thousand dollars. With this capital Beach took


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