American History Books

This book about Westford describes the effect of the mills‚' demise in the 1950s, and chronicles the town‚s recent development into a very appealing bedroom community for workers in Boston.

From its incorporation in 1729 through the late nineteenth century, Westford, Massachusetts, was a farming community sparsely populated by families of English ancestry. But in the first years of the twentieth century, a significant change occurred in Westford when mills that had opened in the town‚'s Forge Village and Graniteville sections began to recruit workers from Russia, Poland, England, Ireland, Scotland, Italy, and Canada. Westford depicts what the arrival of the mills and the mill workers meant to the town and its evolution in the twentieth century.

Cotting School details the interesting history of this national leader in serving children with a broad spectrum of disabilities.

In 1893, two pioneering orthopedic surgeons, Dr. Augustus Thorndike and Dr. Edward Bradford, saw the need to educate children whose physical challenges prevented them from attending school. As an experiment, they founded the Industrial School for Crippled and Deformed Children in Boston. Modeled after 19th-century European institutions, the school was America's first for children with physical disabilities. Early classes were held in a church basement where Mary Perry volunteered to teach seven students. Tuition, a hot meal, and transportation in a horse-drawn carriage were free. Thanks to the leadership of the two doctors and board chairman Francis Joy Cotting, within 10 years the school was housed in an impressive, debt-free brick building. Renamed the Cotting School, the school is now located in Lexington and serves 130 day students from 74 communities. Staffed with highly skilled special education teachers; nurses; physical, occupational, and communication therapists; and dental and vision specialists, Cotting is a national leader in serving children with a broad spectrum of learning and communication disabilities, physical challenges, and complex medical conditions.

Paul St. Germain has been a Rockport resident for 20 years and has developed a revealing record of the men, the quarries, the tools, and the final uses of Cape Ann granite around the nation.

The granite industry began on Cape Ann with the first sale of a piece of Rockport granite, for use as a millstone, to a farmer in Newburyport in 1800. The industry would grow to include more than 60 quarries and operations around the cape, becoming the second-largest economic force in the area behind fishing. Hundreds were employed as quarrymen, stonecutters, paving cutters, and finishers. Cape Ann was particularly well fitted for the pursuit of granite as its rocky hills and shores afforded a comparatively inexhaustible source of supply, and its splendid shipping facilities gave the advantage of quick and economical transportation to market by sea and land. The industry eventually declined, and by 1930, most quarries had gone out of business because of labor strikes and low demand. Today, most of these quarries are filled with rainwater and springwater, and many are used as reservoirs for the surrounding communities.

Cape Cod was known as a ship's graveyard but the Cape Cod Canal, proposed in 1776 and built in 1914 became a vital shipping link and a marvel of engineering.

For centuries, the shoals and high winds around Cape Cod turned its waters into a ships' graveyard. In 1623, Miles Standish proposed a shorter, safer passage by building a canal linking Cape Cod Bay with Buzzards Bay, and in 1776, George Washington ordered the first of many surveys. All attempts failed until 1914, when the Cape Cod Canal opened as a private toll canal. The widest sea-level canal in the world, the Cape Cod Canal continues to be an engineering marvel, a vital shipping link, and a summer destination. These rare images from the Nina Heald Webber Collection at Historic New England survey the canal's development from unsuccessful building efforts in the 1800s, through its 1909-1914 construction, and subsequent improvements in the 1930s.

Hampden brings readers back to the days when world-renowned Thornton W. Burgess wrote his Peter Rabbit books beside Laughing Brook and when Maude Tait, pioneer aviatrix whose speed record beat Amelia Earhart's, taught school in Hampden. The book tells the exciting stories of the people and places that formed the town, such as the early workers, businessmen, preachers, and teachers. Included in Hampden are early photographs of parades and plays, picnics and personalities, and the way of life before the advent of modern transportation, communication, and manner of business.

Referred to as ""one of the prettiest and pleasantest places of all New England towns,"" Georgetown grew rapidly, and by the mid-nineteenth century the population had risen dramatically.

This town, ""a pleasant and flourishing place,"" saw the Boston & Maine Railroad laid out in 1854, with depots at Pentucket Square and at Baldpate, and two street railways in 1896-the Haverhill, Georgetown & Danvers Line and the Georgetown, Rowley & Ipswich Line, both of which greatly facilitated the ease of transportation. Join the author in Georgetown as he takes you on a tour through the town's early years. Visit the schools and churches, the Old Home Week in 1909, the Georgetown Peabody Library, and the Baldpate Inn and Hospital. Experience the natural features, including Pentucket and Rock Ponds, and Bald Pate Hill, the highest elevation in Essex County. See the local tanneries during the pre-Civil War years, which produced enough leather for 32,300 pairs of boots and over 300,000 pairs of shoes.

In Peabody, vivid postcards offer a contrasting view of what it was like to live and work in a community having two distinct characters: the town center, with its bustling tanning industries, which soon earned Peabody the sobriquet of "Leather Capital of the World," and the pastoral farming villages of Brookdale, Locustdale, Brooksby, and West Peabody, which portray a sense of life in rural America during this same era.