While Bridgeport of 1883 was in the middle of a major population surge and solidifying its reputation as a hard-working manufacturing center, Connecticut state government was expanding its social conscience.

Bridgeport's population rose from 19,876 in 1870 to 29,153 in 1880, then 48,868 in 1890.

Mayoral terms were one year back then and control seemed to swing back and forth almost annually between Republicans and Democrats. The Standard History of Bridgeport reported that in 35 mayoral elections after 1860, 18 Democratic and 17 Republican mayors were elected to lead the city.

Democratic fruit and vegetable salesman John L. Wessels, a Civil War veteran whose grandfather, Hercules Wessels, was Gen. George Washington's bodyguard during the American Revolution, was popular enough through his work as an alderman to be voted the city's chief elected official in 1879. He declined a renomination the next year to concentrate on his store at the corner of Wall and Water streets, but won the mayoral election of 1881 and then again in 1883.

Wessels grew up in East Bridgeport and went to work for his brother in Port Chester, N.Y., to learn the produce trade. He traveled by train to New York every morning to bring back fruits and vegetables. During the Civil War, he served as a captain in Battery B of the Connecticut National Guard's light artillery. In 1877, the year after Mayor P.T. Barnum left office, Wessels opened his own wholesale produce business in downtown Bridgeport.

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Methodist, Wessels later got involved in real estate and had a big house on Fairfield Avenue.

The city's 1880 grand list of taxable property was about $15.3 million, up from $12.1 million in 1870.

In January 1883, a month before the penny Evening Post began publication, Catharine Pettengill bequeathed the Burroughs Building to the Bridgeport Library Association, according to "Orcutt's History of Bridgeport," published in 1887 by the Rev. Samuel Orcutt.

Mary Witkowski, who heads the Bridgeport Public Library's Historical Collections from the top floor of the Burroughs Building and is the city historian, notes that Wessels and Republican Daniel Nash Morgan seemed to trade off the mayor's job every other year in the early 1880s.

Morgan, on his way to becoming treasurer of the United States, succeeded Wessels in 1880 and 1884. In Hartford, Hobart B. Bigelow, a Republican from New Haven, was governor from 1881 through 1883 and Democrat Thomas M. Waller of New London from 1883 through 1885.

According to Albert E. Van Dusen's 1961 history of Connecticut, 1883 was the year the General Assembly decided that the soil in upstate Storrs was too poor for a new state agriculture school. A couple of years later, the Storrs Agricultural School was founded anyway and it would eventually become the University of Connecticut.

The 1880s marked the first wave of labor legislation in the state, although a bill banning children under 13 from working in factories wasn't approved until 1886.

According to the record of bills passed in 1883 on file in the General Assembly's Legislative Library, it was the year that companies were required to include "Corp." in their names.

Another law allowed people to sell alcohol — called "spirits" — without a license if the sale was less than five gallons.

The General Assembly that year created a $50 fine if towns and cities did not have fireproof vaults. In 1883, fire insurance companies were allowed to insure against wind storms.

The governor's annual salary that year was hiked to $4,000, while the superintendent of the Capitol was granted a $1,400 salary. Judges were given the discretion to award custody of children to either parent.

Local bills in the Capitol included a $25 fine for people who used methods other than a hook and line to fish in Stratford's Fresh Pond, now called Frash Pond.

The Legislature created fines ranging from $100 to $500 for people caught depositing predatory starfish or periwinkles in oyster or clam beds.

Lawmakers set a much lower penalty of $25 to $50 for killing an eagle. Also in the 1883 legislative session, lawmakers decided that the hometowns of children who died in the state Reformatory should be informed of the news. The Legislature allowed vehicles to be rented on Sundays in 1883, further eroding the "blue laws" that still live on in 2008 with the vestigial ban on package-store sales on Sundays.