PLANT’S PLANT
I had originally prepared for this month’s blog an excerpt from “Bringin’ Up Maggie,” my nonfiction short story (only Maggie’s name is fictitious). As I edited it, I was struck by a particular detail within: piles of “gold” buckles found behind a building near the housing project in which we’d lived in the late 1940’s. I had wandered out of the play-yard to see what was beyond. I returned, pockets filled with gold ephemera. Much later I realized they were nothing more than buckles used to secure girls’ shoe straps, but––to my four-year-old mind––they were valuable treasure and I couldn’t wait to bring them home to my kid sister. I’d always assumed the building must have been a shoe factory. Was it all false memory?
I decided to do a little sleuthing. In no time, my internet search yielded historical proof of the Plant Shoe Factory––the largest in the country and the world in its day––occupying a huge swath of property on Bickford Street, Jamaica Plain MA, around the corner from our small apartment. But the story of the rise and demise of both the factory’s founder and the factory itself was so fascinating, I decided it was a perfect story for Labor Day. I pushed the “Maggie” story to October 1 and offer this in its place:
Plant’s Plant and the Welfare Capitalism Experiment
Thomas Plant, son of French-Canadian immigrants to Maine, quit school at the age of 14 and worked a series of rugged, menial jobs. By 1874, he had secured a position making shoe lasts (the molded leather upper part of the shoe) at a factory in Lynn MA. He made it his business to learn other jobs in the manufacturing process, but factory work and conditions took their toll on his health and eyesight. He saved enough money to invest in a co-op shoe enterprise, sold his shares, and soon had enough money to start his own factory. Both legal and union troubles beset him; shoe factories had a high incidence of workplace injuries and low pay. He closed his first plant in Lynn and moved operations to Jamaica Plain––where the union was less a factor––determined to build a factory that would be safer, more productive, and conducive to happy employees.
By 1897, he employed 1,000 men and women who produced 6,000 pairs of high quality women’s and girls’ shoes. By 1910, the Plant Shoe Factory employed 5,500 workers and was producing 17,000 pairs a day (over six million pairs a year).
Having taken lessons from his own days as a manual laborer, he built a magnificent factory that featured the latest and safest machinery, streamlined processes, and hired engineers to design more efficient shoemaking equipment, better lighting, and air quality. But Thomas Plant’s most notable vision was the novel concept of “welfare capitalism.” Simply, the theory was that happy employees are loyal and productive. And everybody succeeds. His plant included unheard-of workplace amenities, such as a restaurant, a library, a recreation hall that offered lessons and a place to play, childcare, healthcare, and an on-site 13-acre outdoor park designed by Frederick Olmsted, architect of New York’s Central Park. Plant expected eight hours of work, but paid every employee for ten hours.
Ultimately, Plant sold the company to United Shoe Manufacturing Company, squeezed out by the very giant from whom he leased his heavy equipment. When he retired after the sale in 1910, he dispensed $125,000 in gold coins to his employees, along with personal letters of appreciation to all of them. USMC was eventually prosecuted under the Sherman Anti-Trust Act for their coercive practices. After the 1930’s, the factory ceased to produce shoes, was spliced into smaller parcels and rented out. Finally, in 1976, the once-magnificent manufacturing complex burned completely. Suspiciously, the sprinkler system throughout the sprawling structures had been turned off, while fires began in several different areas of the buildings at once.
Thomas Plant and his wife Olive left another remarkable legacy, however. Together they designed and built a sprawling arts and crafts mansion called Lucknow, high in the hills of Moultonborough NH, overlooking Lake Winnepesaukee. Teddy Roosevelt, a friend of the Plants, visited there so often he had his own room. Tragically, Thomas Plant died a pauper, bankrupted by risky investments. Lucknow was renamed Castle in the Clouds, taken over by the Castle Preservation Society of New Hampshire, and is available for the public to see and enjoy.
Plant achieved a sort of utopia in manufacturing for some decades but––alas––his remarkable experiment would not survive the cutthroat pressures of the business.
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©copyright2025 by Jayne M. Adams
Be sure to visit jayneadamswrites.com on October 1….for the story excerpt from “Bringin’ Up Maggie.”