USA > Massachusetts > Essex County > The story of Essex County, Volume I > Part 20
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The following is the confession of Ann Putnam, one of the leaders of the group of "afflicted girls," when she was received to communion in 1706:
"I desire to be humbled before God for that sad and humbling providence that befell my father's family in the year about '92; that I being then in my childhood, should, by such providence of God be made an instrument for the accusing of several persons of a grievous crime, whereby their lives were taken away from them, whom now I have just grounds and good reason to believe they were innocent persons; and that it was a great delusion of Satan that deceived me in that sad time, whereby I justly fear I have been instrumental, with others, though ignorantly and unwittingly, to bring upon myself and this land the guilt of innocent blood; though what
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was said or done by me against any person I can truly and uprightly say, before God and man, I did it not out of any anger, malice or ill-will to any person, for I had no such thing against any of them; but what I did was ignorantly, being deluded by Satan. And particularly, as I was a chief instru- ment of accusing of Goodwife Nurse and her two sisters, I desire to lie in the dust, and to be humbled for it, in that I was a cause, with others, of so sad a calamity to them and their families; for which cause I desire to lie in the dust, and earnestly beg forgiveness of God, and from all those unto whom I have given just cause of sorrow and offense, whose relations were taken away or accused."
The proclamation of the Governor, in May, 1693, freeing all those accused of witchcraft and the subsequent confessions gave the final blow to witchcraft throughout the world. There were a few scattered persecutions on this charge in England, but the common sense of the people of Salem had put an end to this fever.
BIBLIOGRAPHY-Charles W. Upham: "Salem Witchcraft with an Account of Salem Village."
J. Duncan Phillips : "Salem in the Seventeenth Century."
Montague Summers: "The Geography of Witchcraft."
George Lyman Kittredge : "Witchcraft in Old and New England."
Thomas Hutchinson: "The History of Massachusetts" (1628- 1750).
"Narratives of the Witchcraft Cases," edited by George Lincoln Burr.
Early Industries
CHAPTER VII
Early Industries"
By Scott H. Paradise.
The variety of industries existing in Essex County in Colonial and early Republican days cannot fail to impress one who reads the history of those times. Not only were they varied in character, but for the most part they were followed throughout the whole country rather than in concentrated areas. A striking feature of Essex County indus- try is the inventive skill shown by our citizens, a quality which in more than one case has changed the course of manufacture throughout the world, and a quality which has persisted to modern times.
The character of the people who settled here, and the character of the life they led go far to explain why Essex County pursued so many vocations. The immigrants into our territory were largely good, plain people from the eastern shires of England, farmers, tradesmen, and mechanics, men who had a natural bent for working with their hands, considerable skill in such occupations, and a pride in their craft. And in America the old adage that if you want a job done you must do it yourself was truer than anywhere else. Cut off from the world as our forefathers were, if they wanted cloth, shoes, tools, or building materials they must produce them themselves. Two things aided them to do so: the long, hard winters when the farmer and the fisherman could not be at work, and the household system of manufacture brought from England by which every member of the family could take part in the making of shoes, or the spinning, weav- ing, and finishing of a piece of cloth. A rather pleasant picture is
I. Much valuable material for this chapter has been found in the "Standard History of Essex County, Massachusetts," C. F. Jewett & Co., Boston, 1878, and in the "History of Essex County, Massachusetts," J. W. Lewis & Co., Philadelphia, 1888, and for the help afforded by these volumes grateful acknowledgment is made.
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presented by the intimate domestic character of those early indus- tries compared with the impersonality of the modern factory, in which the worker has no stake, does not own his tools, and where his liveli- hood is dependent upon the whim of his employer.
It is natural that the first manufactures should be the essentials of life, garments to be worn, and tools with which to procure food and shelter. And the production of several of these staples, first made
SAUGUS CENTRE-OLD IRON WORKS HOUSE
Built 1642
Courtesy of the Lynn Chamber of Commerce
here by the most primitive methods, became, as a result of our early start, our sea-born commerce, and the inventive genius already alluded to, businesses of world-wide importance.
No attempt will be made here to describe every early industry in the county. Those which are common everywhere and have left no particular mark on our economy such as sawmills, gristmills, crock- ery, and even the distilleries, important as they may have been, will be passed over. Shipbuilding will have part of a chapter to itself.
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On the other hand, products which are characteristic of Essex County will be dealt with at length: the leather goods, the textiles, the hats, and others of importance. Some of no great importance will be dis- cussed because they are curious, or because it seems strange they should have even a brief life among us. Among these are isinglass, snuff, silk, silver, and the export of ice to tropical countries. An effort will be made to confine the account of early industries to their progress before the Industrial Revolution and the advent of the mod- ern factory system, though naturally no hard and fast dividing line can be set between this chapter and the later one on manufactures.
TANNING-At once we get an illustration of the fact that Essex County industries were not localized in any one place, for there are early records of the tanning industry in Essex, Rowley, Wenham, Salem, Bradford, Danvers, Georgetown, Haverhill, Swampscott, Newbury, and Lynn. In every case tanning was among the earliest industries established, a fact easily explained by the need of convert- ing the skins of wild and domestic animals into leather so essential for shoes, gloves, harness and saddles, and a variety of other articles. There has never been a substitute for good leather. Every town needed its own tanyard because travel from place to place was at best difficult and at times impossible by any means except over forest trails.
In Essex tanning was probably carried on in the seventeenth cen- tury. Tanneries were established at Rowley a few years after its settlement. In Georgetown and Swampscott tanning was one of the earliest and most extensive industries, and in Bradford, in 1790, Retier Parker built a tanyard and "contrived to have the stone by which the bark is ground moved by water instead of by horses, cer- tainly a useful improvement."
The splitting machine, invented by Samuel Parker, of Newbury- port, was one of the greatest contributions made to the leather trade. Leather manufacturers had been accustomed to shave a side of leather just as a carpenter planes a piece of wood, thus wasting much valuable leather. Parker's machine made it possible to divide a hide into two sections, both of which could be utilized, and by it two pieces of leather were created where but one had existed before.2
It is interesting to see the eager efforts made by the different towns to attract tanners to them. At Haverhill, where tanning was the
2. Stone: "History of Massachusetts Industries," Vol. I, p. 390.
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first prominent industry, Job Clement was given a quarter of an acre of land on which to establish his tannery. This was in 1643. In 1674, John Kezar, of Salem, was also granted land upon which he established a permanent tanning business. At Newbury it was the custom to promise subsidies of land, or freedom from taxes, or from military duty to tanners who would settle there. These promises brought Nicholas Easton to Parker River and John Bartlett to Bart- lett Springs. In 1649, Job Clement, just mentioned at Haverhill, was promised freeholder's rights if he would remove from Haverhill to Newbury and carry on trade for four years, giving preference to Newbury shoemakers in selling his leather. At Wenham, Daniel McClaflin also fared well. In 1707 the town granted him sixty square rods of common land on condition that he set up a tanner's yard. In 1708 he was given liberty to dam the brook, and 1721 the land was presented to him free of all conditions.
The General Court was as aware as were the towns of the value of tanneries to the Colony. As early as September, 1638, it voted to "remember to provide in the following April for the tanning of divers hides to come," a vote which suggests that through importation of hides the settlers' cattle were to be spared as far as possible. The General Court was equally solicitous that the hides to be tanned should not be wasted, but well and skillfully treated. In 1640 it passed an order for the proper slaughtering of beasts and the proper care and tanning of hides and skins. In 1642 it threatened with a fine any butcher who gashed a skin in slaughtering, forbade butchers, cur- riers, or shoemakers to attempt the "feat or mistery" of a tanner, and at the same time imposed regulations to provide that skins should be properly and carefully tanned. In 1645 goat and sheep skins were barred from exportation unless made into gloves or other garments, and in 1646 a stringent law prevented the exportation of any hides or skins on penalty of forfeiting their full value. In 1642 "Ould Thomas Eabourne," of Salem, was prosecuted and fined for "wrong- ing the country by insufficient tanning."
Lynn may claim with some justice the first tanyard in the Colony,3 because Francis Ingalls, one of the first five settlers there carried on the tanning business in what is now Burrill Street in Swampscott. The list of his successors is a considerable one, including George Kezar,
3. C. J. H. Woodbury, in "Historic Priorities of Lynn," p. 16, says there had pre- viously been several tanneries in the Plymouth Colony.
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who came to Lynn about 1639; Robert Potter, son of one of the first settlers ; Lieutenant John Burrill, also a son of one of the first set- tlers ; his son, Theophilus Burrill, Esq .; Deacon John Lewis; Daniel Newhall; and Nathaniel Sargent. By the 1880's the business had reached such proportions at Lynn that seven hundred and sixty-eight people were employed and the value of the product amounted to $2,309,272. In the earlier part of the century the tanning of heavy leathers had shown a tendency to settle in Danvers and Salem, and Lynn's industry confined itself chiefly to morocco.
Although Salem cannot claim priority in the tanning business, the city early took it to herself and developed, without any obvious rea- son why it should have done so, the greatest tanning industry in the country. In the earliest days families may have often tanned their own leather, using a trough hollowed out of a pine log, in which hides cut into strips of suitable width for the soles of shoes were placed alternately with layers of oak bark and then pounded with a mallet. As lime was scarce, ashes were frequently used to remove the hair from the hides. From the first small steps in advance of these primi- tive methods (in 1639 Philemon Dickerson was granted land "to make tan pits and to dress goat skins and hides," and in 1750 an old Quaker preacher in Danvers, named Joseph Southwick, devised a method to grind bark with a circular stone moved around by a horse), the progress of tanning at Salem has been uninterrupted. There were four tanneries in 1768, eight in 1791, twelve in 1811, and thir- teen in 1821. In IS01 the tanneries began to move from the neigh- borhood of the present Washington Square and Forrester Street to North River and soon that clear and fresh stream had earned the name of "Blubber Hollow." In 1850 there were eighty-three tanning establishments, employing five hundred and fifty men and turning out a product worth $869,047.70. Estimates indicate that in 1878 this business had grown so that it engaged about 1,000 people and pro- duced leather to the value of $4,000,000.
SHOES-Where there is leather there are bound to be shoes, or perhaps, more correctly, shoes are a necessity, and there must be leather from which to make them. We have seen how prevalent the tanning of leather was in Essex County, and it is natural that the manufacture of shoes should go hand in hand with it. Beverly, Dan-
Essex -- 16
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THE STORY OF ESSEX COUNTY
vers, Lynn, Saugus, Georgetown, Rowley, Essex, Marblehead, Haver- hill, Nahant, Hamilton, and Methuen are among the towns which have engaged in this industry to a greater or less extent.
While tanning early acquired a special equipment of vats and bark mills and found it necessary to establish itself near running streams, shoemaking could be, and for all our early period was, per- formed in the home.
For the most part our towns followed the regular routine of a domestic industry, which was, nevertheless, peculiarly characteristic of our county. When the crops were in or the seas too wintry for fishing, some "stock" would be bought from a local tanner or manu- facturer and sitting about the fire, discussing public events with the shrewd wisdom of the back country, the whole family would make shoes, the father and boys doing the heavy work with awl and ham- mer, and the girls "closing" and "binding" the uppers. "Pair by pair the finished shoes went back into the stock box, and when the sixtieth completed the 'set,' the hinged lid was fastened down, and the old horse took a trip to town for pay and fresh work." There is an inter- esting old memorandum among the papers of Abraham Jewett, who began the making of shoes in Rowley about 1703 :
"The two sides of leather which I had of Capt. Osgood, Salem, Decem : 31 : 1717 : I waid Janu : 6 : and they waid but 17 pa and half, one 7pd : one 10 pd and I left 01-14-00 in money for them : they came to 1-6-3 : there is due me from Capt. Osgood 0-7-9."
Though Georgetown has never taken the lead in the manufacture of shoes, the town can lay claim to many inventions useful to the shoe industry, among them the invention of shoe pegs and improved modes in making pegged shoes by Paul Pillsbury, the application of machin- ery to cutting sole leather by H. P. Chaplin, the Post sewing machine devised by David Haskell, the first use of upper leather dies by Hora- tio Nelson, and the first pegging machine and metal-bound patterns by Mr. Chaplin.
Danvers, too, claims the invention of a shoe pegging machine for which Deacon Samuel Preston received a patent dated March 8, 1833, signed by President Andrew Jackson. The first shoemaker in Dan- vers was Zerubbabel Porter, who worked in a little shop at the foot of Porter's Hill at about the time of the Revolution. The shoes made there in early times were chiefly of a coarse grade intended for the
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EARLY INDUSTRIES
Southern slaves and were sent South in coasting vessels. When the War of 1812 made transportation by sea too dangerous, a means of communication by horse teams over the road was devised. For some time a wholesale trade in men's sewed slippers was carried on, these being packed in barrels and sent on private venture by the captains of coasting vessels to Baltimore. From the second decade of the nine- teenth century the number of shoe manufacturers in the town has averaged twenty or more, and the average yearly value of boots and shoes produced has varied from $500,000 to $1,000,000. In 1875 the business showed twenty-five firms engaged in shoe manufacturing, producing goods of an annual average value of $1,331,548.
In view of the present location of the United Shoe Machinery Company at Beverly, it is interesting to find that there was little interest in shoemaking there before the end of the seventeenth cen- tury. At that time the records show that Andrew Elliott and John Smith were among the first of the Beverly "cordwainers," each prob- ably working upon his low bench, having the "kit"-knives, hammer, lapstone, and awls-on one end and the seat at the other, and with the shoe held by a strap over the knee. Later on Joseph Foster sup- plied shoes to the Continental Army and shipped them to the Southern States and the West Indies, while Deacon Nehemiah Roundy, assisted by his three sons, supplied shoes for trade with Africa and other for- eign countries. Beverly, like Georgetown and Danvers, contributed better methods to the industry. Ebenezer Moses, in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, introduced the system of division of labor and first used tin patterns for shaping the soles of shoes. In 1875 Beverly produced boots and shoes to the value of $1,539,800.
It is strange that Haverhill, which as early as 1819 harbored about two hundred shoemakers and was rapidly becoming one of the first shoemaking towns in the State, should have been so inhospitable to the first of the trade who attempted to settle there. In 1676 Wil- liam Thompson asked to be "accepted as a townsman, to dwell here and follow his trade of shoemaking," but the town refused to have him "by a full and clear vote." Moreover, in 1677, Peter Patie, "hitherto accounted of as a journeyman shoemaker," was refused a piece of land to settle upon, and the moderator declared "that it was the duty of the Grand Jurymen to look after him." Perhaps the moderator was right, for in 1680 Peter was presented to the court
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THE STORY OF ESSEX COUNTY
for being absent from his wife for several years, in 168 1 he was pre- sented for having another wife in Virginia, and in 1682 Peter Patre, supposedly the same man, married Sarah Gile and had eight children by her. But Peter Patie, or Patre, ultimately had his revenge on the court, for in 1694 he was elected constable by a "plentiful, clear and legal paper vote." Probably the town objected more to the character and wandering habits of these early itinerant shoemakers than to their trade; at the annual meeting in 1679, "upon the request of Benjamin Webster and Samuel Parker, two young men and shoemakers, that the toune would give them liberty to live in this toune to follow the trade, having hired a house to that end; the toune by their vote doe grant their motion and accept of them so as to live in toune and fol- low the trade of shoemaking."
Haverhill early turned to making ladies' footwear. In 1814, Chase & Cogswell sold "ladies' black morocco shoes, with heels ; ladies' colored morocco shoes, with heels; and ladies' colored and black sandals, with heels."
Phineas Webster is thought to have been the first to manufacture shoes by the wholesale and do nothing else. His business flourished about 1815 ; at first he exchanged his shoes with Danvers tanners and curriers for morocco and leather. They packed the shoes in boxes, barrels, tea chests, and hogsheads and shipped them on the little coast- ing vessels to Philadelphia and Baltimore, where they were exchanged for produce. Arrived there, where the people soon learned of the kind of goods brought, the skipper would hoist up a barrel of shoes and dicker them off.
In 1832 there were twenty-eight shoe manufacturers in Haverhill; the number had grown to forty-two in 1837, to more than ninety in 1857, and to one hundred and seventy in 1887.
We begin to see the importance of the Essex County shipping to the shoe industry. Without it, it is unlikely that our manufacturers could have sent their finished product to the Southern States, to the West Indies, and to Africa, and one great incentive to the growth of their business would have been lost.
Lynn, which was eventually to become one of the great shoemak- ing cities of the world, gave no early promise of the success in this industry which was to come with her maturity. It is true that Philip Kirtland, a shoemaker from Sherrington, in Buckinghamshire,
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came there in 1635. But in spite of his posthumous fame as the founder of the shoe business, there is no reason to suppose that he did more than dozens of other shoemakers in towns like Rowley, Essex, or Haverhill to advance it in the place where he resided.
We may, however, find in Lynn's early history the germ of her later success. The business had progressed slowly from Philip Kirt- land's day, so slowly that in 1750 there were only three men who carried it on to such an extent as to employ journeymen shoemakers. But in that year John Adam Dagyr arrived from Wales. He appar- ently found in his craft a fine art. He took great pains with his work, even to importing the most elegant shoes from Europe and dissecting them for the purpose of discovering the hidden mystery of their elegance. When he had learned their secrets, he instructed his shop companions in the art of cordwaining and sent them forth to work in other shops and pass their skill along. In this manner he established what amounted to a trade school, from which no doubt developed the unusual shoemaking ability of the city.4 But Dagyr never profited from his great contribution. He fell into careless and slovenly habits, became destitute, and died in the almshouse in 1808. While Kirtland has had a street, a hotel, and a business block named for him, Dagyr called in the "Boston Gazette" of 1764, "the celebrated shoemaker of Essex," must rest content with a wild spot in a public park bearing his name.
Lynn owes much to the character and ability of her early shoe- makers. During the Revolution the business dwindled, and then a worthy successor to Dagyr appeared in Ebenezer Breed. He learned all that could be learned in Lynn, then in 1792 visited Europe and not only sent over quantities of the better and most fashionable kinds of shoe stock, but also some skilled workmen to instruct the operatives at home in the more refined aspects of the trade. He succeeded in showing that as elegant and substantial shoes could be made in Lynn as in Europe, but his business languished, because through a lack of tariff protection shoes could be imported from England and France and sold cheaper than they could be produced here. It was a char- acteristic American grievance, and Breed solved it in a characteristic American way. Congress, meeting then in Philadelphia, could always be approached, and Lynn along with other priorities may claim one
1. C. J. H. Woodbury : "Historic Priorities in Lynn," p. 19.
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of the first of the lobbyists. Influential Congressmen, among them Mr. Madison, were invited to a tempting banquet, the attractions of which were increased by the presence of divers charming and lively ladies. One of these was the fascinating Quaker widow, Dolly Todd, afterward Mrs. President Madison. Some of the ladies seem to have been aware of the ulterior purpose of the banquet and to have favored it, for did not Lynn specialize on ladies' shoes ? Ultimately Congress passed a very satisfactory protective measure, and Lynn's future prosperity was assured.
Other Essex County towns had no one comparable to Dagyr and Breed. It only remains to trace the first stages of the prosperous business these men did so much to establish. In 1810 Lynn manufac- tured about 1,000,000 pairs of shoe whose value was $800,000. Twenty years later, in 1830, after Lynnfield and Saugus had been separated from the town, the output was 1,670,000 pairs. In spite of the further loss of Swampscott and Nahant, in 1855 Lynn produced 9,275,593 pairs, and from 1865 to 1875 there were made there on an average not less than 10,000,000 pairs a year of the average value of $1.20 a pair.
TEXTILES-The textile industry really assumes importance in the story of Essex County with the foundation of Lawrence in 1845. It was then the great mills began to rise and their output of woolen and cotton textiles to be sold throughout the world. Their rise and impor- tance will be fully dealt with in the chapter on manufactures.
But from the first the settlers had to clothe themselves, and what they required in the way of cloth they must produce, for the most part, themselves. A good picture of the early Essex County economy is given by Joshua Gee, writing in 1750.5 The last sentence con- tains the gist of the whole matter :
"New England takes from us all sorts of woolen manufac- tures, sailcloth and cordage for rigging their ships, haber- dashery, etc. To raise money to pay for what they take of us, they are forced to visit the Spanish coasts, where they pick up any commodity they can trade for. They carry lumber and provisions to the Sugar Plantations; exchange provisions for logwood with the logwood cutters at Campeachey. They send
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