RATTLE AND HUSH: A BRIEF OVERVIEW OF THE INDUSTRIAL HISTORY OF BROCKTON, MASSACHUSETTS
© Mike Mellor, 2005
The history of Brockton is a true anomaly of the American industrial revolution. Though it was originally the rural North Parish of Bridgewater, so much of New England remained pastures and farmland until after World War II that this segment of Brockton's history is hardly exceptional. While the fortunes of many cities of New England rose and fell with manufacturing's arc, no other turned such a precarious set of geographic and socio-economic conditions into a history to rival Brockton's, saturated with oddball stories of happenstance that are hard to believe. Its national significance may seem scarcely credible to non-natives, but us native sons and daughters feel its centrifugal force of history, for we live the end result of over a century of extraordinary circumstance.
Brockton's City Theatre, the first theatre with electric lights. Stanley A. Bauman.
THE INDUSTRIAL UTOPIA
Every factory town has a claim to fame and Brockton's was "Brockton Shoes the World." As soon as colonists settled the land along the diminutive Salisbury Brook at the beginning of the eighteenth century, people made shoes for themselves and their families, supplemented by itinerant cobblers who traveled the countryside. In the nineteenth century, mills producing shoemaking implements and other metal tools were opened as well as small shoemaking businesses. In precursors to factories, called "ten-footers," a master shoemaker and his apprentices made shoes and sold them to retail stores, or perhaps even opened a storefront of their own.
The shoemakers and manufacturers quickly took advantage of each other's proximity and by the 1830s factories of both varieties cropped up in all corners of the town.(1) Small inter-connected industries working together as one self-sufficient unit was as good as a diligent landlocked town could get, until the first in a series of events integral to American history began to shape the Brockton experience.
In 1846, The Old Colony Railroad opened an inland line extending from Boston through North Bridgewater to Cape Cod.(2) When the line rolled through town, splitting it dead even east and west, the manufacturing community was suddenly linked to Boston northbound and with the Fall River line to New York southbound. The shoemakers no longer had to ship their goods by horse and buggy to a relatively small and rural population, but could ship them as far as the inter-connected maze of rails could take them. With the market now growing exponentially, so too could supply.
The start of the Civil War in 1861 charged another economic expansion. The Union Army, traveling largely by foot, needed an almost inexhaustible supply of boots and shoes. North Bridgewater had a steady source of skilled labor and a new means of transporting their product down the eastern seaboard, but lacked sufficient machinery to fulfill such an immense demand. That was until, as Walter F. Carroll aptly details in Brockton: From Rural Parish to Urban Center, the invention of the McKay sewing machine, a steam-powered machine that sewed the shoe upper to the sole. What had taken a man hours to accomplish before the invention took him only minutes afterwards.
As a result of this confluence of technology, skill and politics, dozens of factories started or moved downtown, hugging the ribbon of rails as it ran through town. North Bridgewater, as a result, raised its output from 79,000 pairs of boots and 22,300 pairs of shoes in 1837 to 103,066 pairs of boots and over a million pairs of shoes in 1865, the penultimate year of the war.
To many people's surprise, the shoe production and population of this small town expanded at an even more rapid pace after the war. While the population increased twenty-two percent to 6,332 between 1855 and 1865, it increased sixty-seven percent between 1865 and 1875 and another ninety-six percent over the following decade. By 1890 the town had changed its name to Brockton, incorporated as a city with a population of 27,294 and sold one-sixth of all the shoes produced in the United States-nearly ten million. Brockton indeed earned its world renown as the Shoe City.
The industrial boom induced by the Civil War gave Brockton a collective wealth that had been previously unimaginable to the region. Many other New England cities and towns made names for themselves in manufacturing, but few could compare with the magnitude of Brockton's success. Those cities that could, like Lowell, did so at a cold-blooded cost to immigrants, children and other working poor. In spite of its comparative lack of natural resources and its location in the middle of the land the pilgrims forsook for the Massachusetts Bay, Brockton took its wealth and applied it to a late nineteenth-century utopian ideal.
The key to Brockton's vision was progress made available to the public: public education, public transportation and innovations introduced for the benefit of society. With the new influx of money came a high school in 1864 and a public library in 1867. In 1880 the New England Telegraph & Telephone Co. established itself in Brockton and made an interstate telephone connection between Boston and Providence, the first in the nation and thus the world. The Brockton Street Railway Company started horse-powered trolley service through downtown in 1881, but this antique method wouldn't last because Thomas Edison decided to change the world by using the city as his "experimental laboratory".
After inventing incandescent light in 1879 and electrifying small portions of Manhattan, Edison was trying to improve his design, which he achieved in Brockton with the three-wire underground system. With this system, not only was a generator able to electrify a larger area than the one square-mile of Edison's previous design, but there was also independent control of each light source. Basically, one wire sent the electricity through, one siphoned it to the light source, and the other siphoned it away, letting one control a light source with minimal effect on the amount of energy provided to all other lights.(3)
Edison Electric Company display, 1915. Robert A. Kane.
With the system perfected and the wires underground, Edison himself threw the switch on October 1, 1883, instantly giving all of downtown incandescent light. Because of this, Brockton had the first theatre and the first fire station with electric lights (1884), was the second city in the world to have incandescent streetlights (1883) and the second city in the country to have an electric street car (1888); both times runner-up to New York.
Brockton made another contribution to improving the worldwide human condition in 1893 by developing a sewage system for inland cities. According to one state government report, "many communities from all over the United States and foreign countries came here to study and adopt this system for their respective cities." Also in 1893, the city abolished grade crossings, an intersection of railroad tracks and a road on the same level.(4)
In addition to transportation and safety innovations, the city also had the largest YMCA in the world of any city with a population under 200,000, it established a dental clinic for school children and had numerous opportunities for recreation, such as the Exhibition of the Brockton Agricultural Society (the Brockton Fair), an Opera House and the aforementioned City Theatre.
1895 advertisement for the Ringling Bros.' Circus. Robert A. Kane
From the very few period accounts of the condition of the working class, Brockton seemed to shimmer with an indefatigable Horatio Alger-style energy. Local real estate investors H.L. and W.C. Bryant published and distributed throughout New England a book entitled Brockton, Mass.: The Men's Shoe Center of the World. Population More than Doubled in the Last Ten Years. A City That has Been Built by Pluck, Energy and Brains. One of its introductory paragraphs states that, "Here you find no poverty, and absolutely none of the wretched squalor that exists in most manufacturing cities."
Everybody felt as though opportunity was but a day's work away. A man could wake up, take a streetcar to the factory, produce the finest product in men's footwear under electric lighting, eat a cheap lunch at the factory cafeteria and take his wife to the theatre or his children to the circus. Compared to the abominable conditions faced by the workers under the iron rules of Carnegie and Rockefeller, the Brocktonian working class lived in a buzzing and whirring Shangri-la; and the rest of the world benefited by proxy.
Notes:
1 In the meantime, the parish declared its independence from the town of Bridgewater and incorporated itself as the town of North Bridgewater.
2 Incorporated in 1821, the Old Colony already had lines extending from Boston to Greenbush and Plymouth.
3 This system is still thoroughly modern and used throughout the world.
