Attleboro: Jewelry Capital of the World

You are passing through Attleboro, Massachusetts, a city that once claimed a title few American cities have ever worn: Jewelry Capital of the World. That boast, painted on a billboard along the main road in nineteen twenty, was not idle pride. Attleboro earned it, one ring and medal at a time, over nearly a century and a half of precision manufacturing.

The story begins in seventeen eighty, when a French settler set up a small brass-working forge in what was then the North Attleborough village. Nobody recorded his name, so history knows him only as the Frenchman. His forge ignited a trade. Within a generation, the area had button makers, then jewelry makers, then military medal manufacturers who kept their presses running through every American war. By eighteen fifty-five, nearly twenty-five jewelry, medal, and button firms operated in town. By nineteen hundred, more than half of Attleboro's eleven thousand residents worked in the trade.

The industry's most famous name arrived in nineteen thirteen, when a young salesman named Lloyd Garfield Balfour rented an old loft and started the company that bore his initials. Balfour had worked for a fraternity jewelry firm in Ohio and was disgusted by its shoddy workmanship. He believed he could do better in Attleboro, where the craft traditions ran deep. He was right. The L.G. Balfour Company would become the dominant maker of class rings and fraternity insignia in the United States, eventually holding contracts with ninety percent of all national fraternal societies. Balfour made World Series rings. Balfour made Super Bowl rings, including the one Joe Namath wore after Super Bowl Three.

At its peak, the Attleboro area was the undisputed center of the American costume and fine jewelry trade, with factories lining the Ten Mile River and train cars hauling finished goods to department stores across the country. When Balfour finally moved its operations to Texas and Mexico in nineteen ninety-seven, it felt like the end of an era, because it was.

Today Attleboro holds its history carefully. The Attleboro Area Industrial Museum preserves molds, presses, and finished pieces from the golden age of the trade. The city that the Frenchman started with a single forge turned out to be, for a long time, the place where America got its rings.