A century ago, the W. & B. Douglas Pump Factory sprawled across both sides of William Street in downtown Middletown. Foundries, storerooms and offices comprised a complex of 21 buildings on 2 acres, with access through a driveway opening on Main Street just south of the Baptist Church. Today, Sbona towers and the Didato Oil Co. stand on the site where most of the world's hydraulic pumps were manufactured for the better part of the 19th century.

Not a tangible trace of the immense Douglas factory remains, and those still living who remember it describe only vacant and deteriorating structures, which were finally razed in the 1940s.

The Douglas factory is slowly being forgotten, but there is a story in the pumpworks, which Middletown would do well to remember, if not to celebrate: the life and character of the factory's founder and president, Benjamin Douglas. His is a remarkable life, not only in its successes, but in the sheer diversity of the man's passions and experiences.

Douglas was an inventor and entrepreneur, politician and abolitionist, churchman and builder of monuments, banker and railroad trustee, world traveler and family patriarch.

Bengamin Douglas grew up on a farm in Northford, a section of North Branford, where he was born in 1816. Douglas and his older brother, William, attended school only during winters, when unable to work on the farm.

At 16, Benjamin was apprenticed to a machinist in Middletown, and in 1839 became a business partner with William, who had come to town and started his own machine shop with W.H. Guild seven years earlier.

In 1849, the brothers invented "the celebrated revolving stand pump," a revolution in the pump industry. So consistent was the quality of Douglas pumps, the firm enjoyed what amounted to a monopoly in the market, shipping its products across the country and around the world.

At the height of its success, the W. & B. Douglas Co. catalog offered 1,200 different pumps and a variety of related hydraulic machinery. In 1884, the factory employed 300 workers.

The death of William Douglas in 1858 did not derail the pumpworks; by that time there was another generation of Douglases to carry on the family enterprise. On his 22nd birthday, in 1838, Benjamin had married Mary Parker, daughter of Elias and Grace Mansfield Parker and a niece of Major General Joseph K. Mansfield; William married Mary's sister, Grace, the next year.

Benjamin's eldest son, John, was first to enter the business, later followed by Edward, and William's eldest son, Joseph. The pumpworks became so populated by Dougleses, in fact, that in 1869, Benjamin was forced to run an ad in the Middletown Constitution warning readers to beware an imposter claiming to be Charles Douglas, who had attempted to collect money from the company's customers.

Success sent Benjamin around the world; the local press reported on his regular steamer voyages to Europe, his visits to Rome, and his frequent attendance at the annual Paris Exposition.

Returning from these trips, Douglas could walk from the docks at the river to the fine home he built at the corner of Church and South Main streets. The house still stands with its commanding view of South Green, now used as private office space.

Douglas' activities as a leading citizen of the city testify to his desire to develop and improve Middletown, a desire motivated not only by his own business concerns, but by his passion for the developing issues of his day: preservation of the Union and the abolishment of slavery.

Douglas ran for and was elected mayor in 1850, serving until 1855. In 1860, he was a presidential elector for the state, casting one of six electoral votes for the Republican candidate, Abraham Lincoln.

In 1861 and 1862, he was lieutenant governor under William Buckingham. One of Douglas' particularly passionate speeches on maintaining the Union prompted the formation of the First Connecticut Heavy Artillery, which saw considerable action during the conflict. At war's end, it was Douglas who pressed not only for the renaming of South Green as Union Park, but advocated and organized the construction of the War Memorial that remains there to this day.

But it was the issue of slavery which most captured Douglas' passion and resourcefulness. As early as 1839, Douglas was active in the Middletown Anti-Slavery Society, and the organization met for years at his factory, where windows were often broken and members harassed by pro-slavery activists.

Douglas, along with his friend and neighbor Jesse Baldwin (who lived across from the factory at 15 Broad St.), helped slaves travel the Underground Railroad.

The Douglas house on South Green was a stopping point well known to conductors, and Baldwin's boat, named "The W.B. Douglas," is rumored to have carried fugitive slaves along the Connecticut River.

Apart from his role as industrialist, politician and social activist, Douglas was a deacon at South Congregational Church for more than 40 years, superintendent of its Sunday School and clerk of the Strict Society, which managed the Church's business affairs. In 1865, Douglas proclaimed: "We believe that the interests of our Church and Society, of the cause of Morality and Religion, and of the growing community around, call upon us to make the necessary sacrifice of property and time to erect a new house of worship which shall be a credit to our Society and an ornament to our City worthy of a people blessed with a godly Puritan ancestry." The present South Church edifice is the result of that resolution, and Douglas himself is purported to have borne half the cost of construction.

In his spare time, Douglas was trustee of both Wesleyan University and the Asylum for the Insane, a director of the Air Line Railroad, and president of the Connecticut State Temperance Union and of the Connecticut Bible Society.

He helped organized the First National Bank of Middletown, and served until his death as president of the Farmers & Mechanics Savings Bank.