Last-ing recognition
The city plans to honor Jan Matzeliger, who revolutionized the shoe industry in Beverly and beyond
The old United Shoe is, of course, a big part of Beverly’s history — so much so that the men who first started the factory have streets named after them, mostly in Shingleville, the neighborhood that was built to provide housing for Shoe employees. There’s McKay, Matthies, Goodyear, Sturtevant, Blake, Winslow.
There’s another name that was instrumental in the early success of the Shoe, though. And now, more than a century after his death, he’s finally getting his due in Beverly.
The city is planning to name the street into the Beverly Golf & Tennis Club after Jan Ernst Matzeliger. Matzeliger was the inventor of the automatic shoe-lasting machine, which revolutionized the shoe industry and helped propel the United Shoe Machinery Corp. here in Beverly into the country’s dominant producer of shoemaking machines, not to mention a company that employed generations of Beverly residents.
Matzeliger has been recognized in Lynn, where he lived and worked in a shoe factory, by having a bridge named after him. The U.S. government issued a Black heritage postage stamp in his honor in 1991. He’s also in the National Inventors Hall of Fame.
But not until now is he being recognized in Beverly, where his invention helped lead to the formation in 1899 of the United Shoe Machinery Company, which manufactured his lasting machines in Beverly for use around the world.
“We think so much of the gentlemen that came together to build the United Shoe,” said Historic Beverly Director Abby Battis, referring to the men who already have streets named after them. “But it really is Jan Matzeliger that changed the game for those machine makers.”
The idea to honor Matzeliger came from the North Shore branch of the NAACP. Kenann McKenzie-DeFranza, the president of the branch and a Beverly resident, said North Shore NAACP members gathered in January to learn about a new mural in Matzeliger’s honor at Cummings Center. Cummings, of course, is the site of the former United Shoe and has gone to great lengths to preserve the Shoe’s history in displays and murals throughout its complex.
“While there has been recognition of (Matzeliger’s) legacy in nearby Lynn, we felt it was equally important for Beverly to honor the man whose invention helped build its economic foundation,” McKenzie-DeFranza wrote in a letter to North Shore NAACP members.
McKenzie-DeFranza reached out to Ward 1 City Councilor Todd Rotondo about the idea of naming a street after Matzeliger. Rotondo said he was told it would be difficult to change the name of a current street for public safety reasons, but he came up with the idea of naming the road into Beverly Golf & Tennis Club. The club is the former United Shoe Country Club and was built for Shoe employees.
Matzeliger was born in 1852 in what was then Dutch Guiana and is now Suriname, to a Dutch father and a Surinamese mother who had been enslaved. At age 10 he began working in machine shops supervised by his father. He came to the United States in 1873, and by 1877 had moved to Lynn, where he became an apprentice in a shoe factory.
Battis, who studied Matzeliger’s history when she worked at the Lynn Museum, said he was working on the assembly line in Lynn and kept noticing a bottleneck at the final step — the lasting process in which the sole of the shoe was attached to a leather upper.
“That all had to be done by hand,” Battis said. “He realized, ‘We could be much more productive if that could be mechanized.’”
Battis said Matzeliger would go back to his sparse room at a boarding house in Lynn and draw up plans to automate the last-making process. According to the National Inventors Hall of Fame, he built his first model out of wooden cigar boxes, elastic and wire. It took two years to complete a prototype, which was so complex that patent examiners needed to see it in operation to understand it.
The new invention could produce 700 pairs of shoes per day, a dramatic increase over the 50 pairs that a skilled laster could make by hand, according to the National Inventors Hall of Fame:
As a result, shoe prices dropped by nearly half, making quality shoes affordable to a great number of people for the first time. By 1889, Matzeliger’s shoe-lasting machine was overwhelmingly in demand. The Consolidated Lasting Machine Co. was formed to manufacture the machines, and Matzeliger was given a large amount of the organization’s stock.
Tragically, Matzeliger died of tuberculosis that same year, one month before he would have turned 37. Tuberculosis was then called the “shoemaker’s disease” due to its prevalence among shoeworkers, according to the Lynn Museum. He is buried at Pine Grove Cemetery in Lynn.
Ironically, Battis said, Matzeliger worked to make sure his invention was a clean machine, because he knew the dangers of working in a shoe factory.
“He was genius,” Battis said. “He was absolute genius.”
The honor for Matzeliger is part of a larger effort in Beverly to recognize the contributions of Black people to the city’s history. Battis said Historic Beverly is working on establishing a Black History Trail, starting with a sign at Independence Park honoring Esop Hale and another at Hospital Point in honor of Jethro Thistle. Both were enslaved men from Beverly who fought for the country’s independence in the Revolutionary War. The Beverly 400th committee is helping with the Hale marker, while Essex Heritage is assisting with the Thistle sign.
The Beverly Golf & Tennis Commission has voted in favor of the Matzeliger idea. The matter is now before the City Council. Rotondo said he is hoping the city can erect the sign on June 8, the same day the Beverly 400th committee is holding its golf tournament as part of the year-long celebration marking the city’s 400th anniversary. The road will be called Matzeliger Way.