North Attleborough: Jewelry Capital

North Attleborough split from Attleborough in eighteen eighty-seven, but its story began long before that. In the late seventeen hundreds, local metalworkers began making buttons and other small metal goods, and from that base a jewelry industry grew. By the mid-eighteen hundreds, North Attleborough and neighboring Attleboro had become a major jewelry-making center, with dozens of small shops. The industry gradually moved overseas in the late twentieth century, but the downtown streetscape still carries the confident brick of those prosperous manufacturing decades.