Joanne S Foley

Lynn Joanne S Foley

Lynn was settled only nine years after the landing of the Pilgrims at Plymouth. It quickly became renowned for its shoe shops (or "ten footers"), and almost every family in town became involved in some way in the shoe-manufaturing process. Lynn's citizens have always been an industrious lot, and they soon built their small town into a city of prosperity. By 1850, with the arrival of the Industrial Revolution and the influx of many immigrants from Europe, Lynn had grown into a booming city known as the "Shoe Capital of Massachusetts." This fascinating new book chronicles Lynn's colorful history, from the 1850s, when the city entered the industrial age, to the 1950s. More than two hundred black and white photographs bring to life the people, places, and events which have defined Lynn. We experience the "Great Fire" which destroyed so much of the city in 1889; the emergence of the General Electric Company and the opening of Lynn Hospital; meet prominent and pioneering women such as entrepreneur Lydia Pinkham; and encounter larger-than-life figures like Hiram Marble, who spent his life digging for buried treasure supposedly left by pirate Thomas Veal, and renowned fortune-teller Moll Pitcher.