A century ago, New England was the world's shoemaker. Factories in Massachusetts towns such as Brockton, Haverhill, Marlboro and Peabody drove the local economy, churning out millions of pairs of shoes that were shipped from nearby ports to Europe and beyond.
Most of those factories have long since gone quiet, but last week's US$3.8 billion sale of Canton-based Reebok International Ltd to German-based Adidas-Salomon AG continues the erosion of what was once one of the region's signature industries.
The Reebok sale was the latest in a series of industry mergers that has also swept up two other Massachusetts shoemakers in recent years -- Saucony and Converse -- and threatens more lost jobs.
The symbols of New England's shoemaking legacy are still easy to see in Lynn, the North Shore city of 80,000 where three of every five workers was once employed by shoe factories. But Lynn's last shoe plant shut down five years ago, and the few remaining brick factories are either vacant or being converted to loft apartments.
"It's a factory town, and we're embracing what we once were," said Diane Shepard, archivist librarian at the Lynn Museum and Historical Society.
The industry emerged alongside textile mills in the early 19th century. With easy access to ports and waterways, entrepreneurs employed new manufacturing techniques and relied on low-cost raw materials from the South to mechanize and expand the industry, giving New England a global reputation as a shoe supplier. Shoemaking equipment was produced by United Shoe Machinery Corp, whose Beverly headquarters are a local landmark.
The industry eventually spread to neighboring New Hampshire and into Maine, home to brands like Bass, Rockport and Eastland.
Regional links among shoe and leather makers and machinery suppliers kept the industry healthy through much of the 20th century.
"As long as those historical links stayed intact, the regional industry did well," said Bob Forrant, a historian who has studied New England's industrial past.
But the industry was challenged by the emergence of midwestern meatpacking plants, which produced leather that could be transported on an expanding rail network to shoemakers nationwide. New England's high labor costs also drove jobs to the South and eventually to East Asia.
"The companies began to see the potential for making more money by moving the work, at first to other places in the United States, and then to the global economy," Forrant said.
Reebok in the 1980s became one of the first major sneaker makers to move production jobs to east Asian countries with low labor costs.
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