Mayberry Village

Mayberry Village is an urban area in east central East Hartford, Connecticut, US. Once a prominent area, after the decline of the Pratt & Whitney airplane engine manufacturing plant, the area declined and its population gradually became low-income.

The village is home to Labor Field, which contains a baseball park, and to Franklin H. Mayberry Elementary School.

The Sunset Hills area is often erroneously considered part of Mayberry Village. The original neighborhood, bordered by Home Terrace, Highview, Edgewood and Arbutus streets, was called Laurel Park Heights, named after the trolley park that was located where Sunset Hills was developed in the late 50s. Old trolley tracks can still be seen in the Hockanum River Gorge. To the north is Burnside Avenue. To the south is Chester Street. To the west are other residential neighborhoods. To the east is Manchester, Connecticut.

Mayberry Village was built in 1941 on what was the Cannon family farm, to house the influx of people who worked at Pratt and Whitney and other defense industries in Connecticut. The upper section of mostly multiple-unit construction was built first and then the "New Village", single and duplex units, was built. The complex was named after Doctor Mayberry, a local physician who was killed while crossing railroad tracks under Burnham Street in East Hartford. In 1956, the units were offered for sale to those people living within them. Many of these families did buy their houses and rented the other apartments to the people who continued to live there.

In the earlier days, Mayberry Village was a cohesive community, managed by the Housing Authority out of the Community Building. On the first of the month, children would carry envelopes to the rental office to pay the families' rent. The village was a safe place and there was no fear of robbery. In most families, the father was a defense worker, often a veteran of World War II, and the mother stayed home during the day. During the day, many peddlers came through: Jake, on the vegetable truck; a popcorn vendor pedaling a bicycle cart; the ice cream truck; bread and milk delivery; a rag man weighing and buying cloth; and the insurance man once a month to put a stamp in the insurance booklet after payment.

During the winter, people would ice skate on the cove, and in the summer kids played in Labor Field and other fields and woods around the village. Labor Field had been a victory garden during World War II and still had vegetables popping out of the ground in the early years. Both sides of the Hock were all thick woods, up in the Laurel Park area and across from Bergren Dairy, and full of kids in the summer. When the 5:00 whistle went off at the Case Brothers Mill on Burnside Avenue, across from Wickham (Mrs. Wickham was still alive and lived in the house on the property that is now gone), the woods emptied of kids running home for supper.

...
Wikipedia