Lynn Museum / LynnArts

In 1629, settlers from Salem wishing to start their own community bought land north of present-day Boston from the Pawtucket Indians. The new town was incorporated as Saugus, but included today's separate townships of Swampscott, Nahant, Saugus, and Lynn. Samuel Whiting, the town's first minister, came from King's Lynn, England, and the community was renamed in 1637. Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it would remain a small, agricultural and shell fishing village, with the first North American ironworks established at Saugus in 1643 (see Saugus Iron Works). Lynn was also home to the first tannery (established 1629) in what would become the United States. This led a Quaker citizen named Ebineezer Breed to promote Lynn as a shoe center in the New World. Boosted by the arrival of the Eastern Railroad from Boston to Salem in 1837, a shoe factory and boardinghouses for workers were erected, and Lynn was officially incorporated as a city in 1850. Unlike in many other U.S. cities, the American Civil War actually benefited Lynn's economy, and by the end of the nineteenth century Lynn was the largest shoe manufacturing town in the world—in spite of major fires in 1869 and 1889 in the town's central business district (1; 2). Its shoreline became popular among the wealthy as a resort area, particularly for Boston residents, and the city was also home to the Thomson-Houston Electric Company, which in 1892 merged with Thomas Edison's business to form the General Electric Company; to Lydia Pinkham (see Lydia Pinkham House), one of the 19th century's most successful businesswomen; and for a time to astronomer Maria Mitchell, the first woman in the Academy of Arts and Sciences. The first U.S. jet engine airplane was constructed at the General Electric plant in Lynn in 1942 (2).