Auburn, Maine

Auburn, on the western bank of the Androscoggin River, spent the better part of a century as one of the most productive shoe manufacturing cities in the world, a place where the industrial revolution took leather and stitching and made them the foundation of an entire economy.

The factory system of shoe manufacturing came to Auburn in eighteen thirty-five, when entrepreneurs recognized that the falls on the Androscoggin and Little Androscoggin rivers could power machinery that would transform what had been a craft trade into an industrial one. By eighteen forty-eight the railroad arrived from Portland, and the twin cities of Auburn and Lewiston on opposite banks of the Androscoggin exploded in growth. The population of Auburn in eighteen sixty was about four thousand people. By eighteen ninety it was twelve thousand, swelled by waves of immigrants, especially French Canadians from Quebec who came by train seeking work in the mills and factories.

At its peak, Auburn's shoe industry was staggering in scale. By nineteen seventeen, a single Auburn factory was producing seventy-five percent of the world's entire supply of white canvas shoes. The city seal, depicting a spindle ringed by different types of shoes, captured exactly what Auburn understood itself to be: a place that put the world on its feet.

The decline came after the Second World War. Between nineteen fifty-seven and nineteen sixty-one, the largest manufacturers closed their Auburn factories, unable to compete with lower wages elsewhere. What remained were neighborhoods of handsome Victorian mill housing, the Androscoggin falls, and a city working to reinvent itself.

Auburn and its twin city Lewiston across the river together form one of the most interesting small industrial cities in New England, now home to a thriving community of Somali and other African immigrants who have brought new energy to streets that once echoed with the thump of shoe machinery.