Page:The Granite Monthly Volume 7.djvu/358

 322

��Town and City Histories.

��[May,

��" Patrick Buckley, the ' Lynn Buck,' ran five miles in twenty-eight minutes and thirty-eight seconds, at the Trot- ting Park, for a belt valued at fifty dollars. And on the fourth of Decem- ber, William Hendley ran the same distance in twenty-eight minutes and thirty seconds."

The " Lynn Buck," seems to have been an important personage in those days, for we read under date of 1858: —

" The ' Lynn Buck,' so called, walked a plank at Lowell, in February, a hun- dred and five consecutive hours and forty-four minutes, and with but twenty- nine minutes' rest. A strict watch was kept on him."

We are very glad to know about the " strict watch," but really it was too bad of the authors not to let us know if those forty-four minutes, also, were not consecutive. They might, too, have told us to advantage something about the modus operandi of " walking a plank." It has been the general im- pression that the man who walks a plank performs the operation in an unpleasant hurry — unpleasant for him ; and that he will take all the rest he can get — before he begins ; and that he has an eternal rest, or unrest, after he has finished. But perhaps this has been a wrong impression. If the authors are alive, it is due to the public that they should rise and explain.

Enough of pleasantry. Let us ex- amine the book with serious mind, if we can. Everybody knows that shoes have been the making of Lynn, that they are and have been for years the backbone of its prosperity, the life of its business. To say that Lynn is the greatest shoe-manufacturing city in the country, and, for that matter, in the world, may be an exaggeration, but

��it is a very common one. In a history of Lynn we might expect this fact to be at least recognized. Let us see how that is in the present case.

The shoe business was not unknown in Lynn before 1750, but in that year it first got a firm footing here. So we are not surprised to find the fact men- tioned, but we are somewhat disap- pointed to find only half a page given to it. Beyond this, mention of the shoe trade in the last century is very slight, as, no doubt, was the trade itself. Since 1800, however, the trade has been rapidly increasing, and has gradually assumed enormous propor- tions. Yet in this precious volume we find the subject mentioned just once in the chronological annals, three lines being devoted to it under the head of 1810 : "It appeared, by careful estima- tion, that there were made in Lynn, this year, one million pairs of shoes, valued at eight hundred thousand dol- lars. The females ( ! ) earned some fifty thousand dollars by binding." To be sure, the burning of two shoe fac- tories received, respectively, two and three lines ; the formation of an in- effective board of trade by shoemakers, ten lines ; and of an equally fruitless union by journeymen shoemakers, ten lines. .4 page and a quarter {iniradile dictu) is devoted to a shoemakers' strike with no definite result. In a biography, the connection of its subject with the shoe business is mentioned in a quoted letter. A quick job by a shoe- maker receives six lines, and one by another, four ; and the death of a third is mentioned.

In an appendix the state of the shoe business in 1864 is discussed at length in a third of a half-page ! All we learn from it is that by the State returns in the year ending June i, 1S33, there

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