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Cache is just off the paved path around the upper pond of the old United Shoe Machinery Company. Cache is less then 20 feet from paved path down a small slope so minimal bushwacking is required. From the parking coordinates you can go on the Planters Path which will take you around the Upper pond or you can head to the Shore Ponds Walkway to get to the cache quickly.
The area you are visiting is rich in history and importance to the city of Beverly.
Founded in 1899 by a merger of the supposedly noncompeting Goodyear Machinery Company, Consolidated Hand Lasting Machine Company, and McKay Shoe Machinery Company, United Shoe Machinery Company, as it was then known, revolutionized shoe equipment manufacturing and the shoe industry itself. Its establishment of an international division made it one of the first three international companies ever formed, and it became a worldwide powerhouse as affiliated companies were set up in the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Canada, South America, and Asia by 1905. The new company became United Shoe Machinery Corporation on May 1, 1905.
The Beverly plant boasted such modern inventions as the first time-clocks produced by IBM, the hot glue gun, the pop top for the soda can, the drive mechanism for the lunar module, as well as pop rivets used in the Supersonic Concorde. By 1960, however, its inexorable slide from the glory days was underway. In 1968 the name was shortened to USM Corporation to reflect the company's greatly changed emphasis in the post litigation era.
In addition to having its own stop on the north/south rail line between Boston and Lowell, USM actually had Boston & Maine Railroad passenger trains that pulled right into the Elliott Street yard every morning and evening. As Massachusetts became more and more industrialized in the early 20th century, USM indirectly supplied the experienced staff who would later gear up many other industries as well.
In 1911, various divisions included the gun club, a new baseball division, a motor boating division, a soccer/football coterie, a bowling league, and a cricket team. There was also a band, a chorus, and a vegetable-growing group. Tennis, and the now municipally owned 18-hole golf course, came along just a few years later.
Indeed, employee athletic and recreational opportunities were of prime importance from USM's earliest days in Beverly. Most were centered in a clubhouse (now Beverly Golf and Tennis Club), where special attention seemed to be given to meeting the needs of both male and female workers.
"While the United Shoe is one of the largest factories in the country," NEW ENGLAND Magazine noted in 1911, "the provisions made for the comfort, safety, health and contentment of its mass of employees, at times upwards of five thousand persons, men and women, are pronounced to be not excelled, and, perhaps, not equaled at any other factory in the world." The factory, in the judgment of factory experts, ranked "foremost among the best type of twentieth century industrial establishments."
Upper and Lower Shoe Ponds
Fed primarily with underground springs, Lower Shoe Pond and Upper Shoe Pond have a combined 19-million-gallon capacity. Recent removal of accumulated brush, junk, and other debris has opened up pastoral views to the tree-lined north and west sides of the ponds. A path with benches runs along the east side of Upper Shoe Pond. A pump hose on the west side of this pond still provides irrigation water for the nearby golf course, an early USM employee amenity.
The property is bordered on the west by a very attractive single family residential district, originally a USM development for managers' homes. (Street names within this subdivision commemorate USM founders.) At the northwest corner of the site is the entrance to the Beverly Golf and Tennis Club, formerly United Shoe Golf and Country Club (and itself listed on the National Register of Historic Places). Just east of the golf course is Beverly's new James L. McKeown Elementary School, on land donated to the city by Cummings Properties.
North of Balch Street, brick single-story multi-family housing, an open field behind Memorial Middle School, and additional single-family homes enclose the site. Bordering the northeast corner of the site, directly across the railroad right of way, is the Balch House property (c.1600, another National Register listing and considered the oldest wood-framed house in the United States), and its surrounding landscape of mature trees.
The site's tidewater location made it a prominent point in Beverly history. The tidal basin, long dammed for industrial use, was the original landing place for Beverly's founding "planters." A bronze plaque set in a projecting boulder at the Upper Shoe Pond's north end commemorates the landing point of these town fathers. The path connecting the landing to the Balch House site (home of John Balch, one of Beverly's original settlers) is further identified by a bronze marker on a cut granite base on the site along Balch Street. The Friends Mill (c.1850) at the southwest corner of the site replaced a much earlier mill and dam (c.1660).
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(Decrypt)
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