Innovation in the City of Sin: Shoes, GE Jet Engines, and Fluffernutters in Lynn, Massachusetts

One of the stunning murals that adorn downtown Lynn

I visited Lynn, Massachusetts, the other day. It's one of those old New England cities that supported a community of innovators that ruled the commercial world for more than a century before the Great Depression and emergence of the New South. 

If you live in my corner of New England, this rise and fall of great cities describes New Bedford, Fall River, Brockton, Taunton, Lowell, Haverhill, and Beverly, to name a few. 

Between whaling and textiles, for example, nineteenth-century New Bedford was considered the richest city per capita in the world. Fall River and its textile mills weren't far behind. Taunton had booming textile machinery, silversmithing, and stove-making industries in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. 

This elegant Glenwood Stove, exhibited at the Old Colony History Museum, was produced by
the Weir Stove Company of Taunton. 

Lowell, which I visited and profiled in 2013, was famous for attracting the greatest concentration of industrial capital in America before the Civil War. Its scale and integration left European visitors in awe.

One of the wonderfully preserved textile machines exhibited at the Lowell National Historical Park.

Lynn was settled in 1629 and eventually carved up into today's mostly-urban Lynn, Reading, Lynnfield, Saugus, Swampscott, and Nahant. Old Lynn contributed early to American innovation as home to one of the country's first ironworks, Hammersmith. 

Known today as the Saugus Iron Works, this early industrial site is conserved by the National Park Service.
I profiled the site here in 2014.

Lynn, Lynn, City of Sin

Even folks who know nothing about Lynn may know this bit of doggerel:

Lynn, Lynn, the city of sin

You never come out the way you came in.

(For the record, I did come out the way I came in, except for a stop at Dunkin Donuts.)

There are other verses, though I'll limit dazzling you to just one more:

You ask for water, yet they give you gin

The girls say no, but they always give in.

There's speculation that this rhyme arose during Prohibition when Lynn, being on the Atlantic coast and only seven miles north of Boston, had its fair share of successful bootleggers and drinking establishments. Maybe this ditty was also inspired by the proximity of sailors in nearby Salem crossing the border in search of late-night libations and entertainment.

And maybe--my theory--is that Lynn is easy to rhyme with about 500 one-syllable words, prompting a lazy poet in Swampscott or Manchester-By-The-Sea to change cities after checking his rhyming dictionary. In 1997, Lynn's solicitor proposed changing the name of the city to Ocean Park, but voters turned him down. A good thing, I think.

In its favor, Lynn is home to the Lynn Museum, which tells the city's fascinating history. I stopped in for a visit. Below are a few of the innovations and industries for which Lynn is famous.

While Brockton became known as "The Shoe City," Lynn was the center of colonial shoemaking. The boots worn by the Continental Army were made in Lynn, a legacy reflected in the city's seal.

For much of the 19th century, only Haverhill rivaled Lynn for shoe production, and only in the 20th century did Brockton surpass Lynn's volume. I did a post on the murals and shoes of Haverhill here.

Created for the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago, this "Shoe Medallion" is comprised of 234 miniature leather shoes, now faded from their original red, white, and blue.

In the same way that New Bedford's whaling families read the tea leaves and shifted their capital from the sea to textile mills, Lynn's shoe barons invested in the early electric industry. Engineer and inventor Elihu Thomson attracted local capital to help fund his Thomson-Houston Electric Company.

Thomson's work in alternating currents made Edison's lightbulb a practical reality. Lynn investor Charles A. Coffin purchased Thomson's company and, in 1892, merged it with Edison's General Electric Company. The marriage of Thomson's and Edison's brilliance resulted in the creation of General Electic, perhaps America's most iconic company.

General Electric built facilities in Schenectady and Lynn, a campus comprised of lighting, motor, generator, and turbine gear divisions. During WWII, GE was asked to build the first jet engines manufactured in the United States.

This jet engine is model J85, manufactured around 1960.

Another Lynn innovator who became nationally famous was Lydia Pinkham, the tenth of twelve children born to abolitionist Quaker parents.

"Born in Lynn in 1819," the Lynn Museum placard reads, "Lydia Pinkham brewed a variety of herbal remedies for women in her kitchen and distributed them to her female neighbors, friends and family."

Lydia's concoctions, controversial even at the time for their aggressive marketing and questionable results, were designed to treat symptoms associated with menstruation and menopause. The Food and Drug Act wouldn't bring law and order to the patent medicine world until 1906. Before that, remedies such as Lydia Pinkham's Vegetable Compounds (and not far away in Lowell, Ayer's Cherry Pectoral) would be consumed by thousands of Americans and make their inventors rich.

Like the city of Lynn, Lydia's medicine was subject to its own special ditty, "The Ballad of Lydia Pinkham," sometimes (in a less polite version) called "Lily the Pink," which shall not be reprinted here.

OK, but just one, G-rated verse:

Old Ebenezer thought he was Julius Caesar

And so they put him in a home

Where they gave him medicinal compound

And now he's the emperor of Rome. 

(Yes, you'll have to google the rest on your own.)

The British band "The Scaffold" did a popular sanitized version of "Lily the Pink" in 1968. This may make your teeth hurt. You have been warned.

Finally, a concoction that I can personally endorse as benefiting health and well-being is the Fluffernutter, which got its start in Lynn, where Fluff is still manufactured.

Just as Lynn almost became Ocean Park, the Fluffernutter almost became the official sandwich of Massachusetts. But, also like Lynn, cooler heads prevailed.

I would encourage you to visit this very interesting museum in the heart of Lynn, home to the first iron works, tannery, American jet engine, and, well, first sandwich with peanut butter and marshmallow spread. 

Residents of Hispanic origin make up a quarter of the city's 100,000 population, which also includes a large Russian community. The city's Pine Grove Cemetery is one of the largest in the country and has a wall around it, Ripley's once wrote, second in length only to the Great Wall of China. 

Famous sons and daughters include Tony Conigliaro, Mary Baker Eddy, and F. Lee Bailey.

The final bit of innovation featured prominently in the Lynn Museum has to do with Krippendorf and Krippendorf's alpha. I've researched it carefully and have no idea what it is. But, for a History major, this machine is fantastic anyway.

As one of my friends who was kind enough to pre-read this post wrote, "Shoes, GE, Lydia Pinkham, Krippendorf. All good. But you had me at Fluff."

I'll leave you with a few more images from the Museum and surrounding murals.

There had to be birds.

This sculpture is a "Rogers Group." Don't ask me how I know.

Not everything in Lynn was designed to attract sailors from Salem.