H. Wales Lines Company

In 1864, H. Wales Lines and his uncle, Charles Perkins, formed Perkins & Lines, a building company, in Meriden, Connecticut. In 1878, Perkins withdrew from the company, which was renamed H. Wales Lines & Co and was headed by Lines and Henry E. Fairchild. It underwent another name change in 1888, when it became the H. Wales Lines Company, with Lines as the president and treasurer, Henry E. Fairchild as vice-president, and Lewis A. Miller as secretary.

Throughout its iterations, the firm remained a supplier of wholesale and retail building materials and supplies, and employed contractors, engineers, and draftsmen to realize building plans submitted by architects and engineers.

In Meriden, many of the town's residences, manufacturing buildings, banks, churches and schools were built by H. Wales Lines Company or one of its predecessors. The company expanded to build all over Connecticut, with buildings, many of them industrial, in New Haven, Naugatuck, Bridgeport, New London, Mystic, and more. Philadelphia, PA, and various towns in New York and New Jersey also employed the building company.

H. Wales Lines died in 1927, after a long career as a businessman and politician (he served three times as the mayor of Meriden), and was succeeded by his grandson, Wales Lines deBussy, also a politician. DeBussy stepped down to vice-president in 1935. Charles H. Phelps then took over as president. The company dissolved in 1983, after more than 100 years in business as "the company that built Meriden."