Tour Description
Presented By:
Marilynn Johnson
Program Description:
On February 4, 1976, a suspicious fire consumed a massive old factory building at the corner of Centre and Bickford Streets in Jamaica Plain. Displacing more than a hundred artists-in-residence, the old factory had once been home to the Thomas G. Plant Shoe Company, employing up to five thousand workers at its peak.
Marking the 50th anniversary of that devastating fire, Marilynn Johnson's presentation explores the origins of the Plant shoe factory in 1896 and its mercurial French-Canadian owner, Thomas Plant, known for his pioneering business and corporate welfare practices.
Johnson will also discuss the thousands of immigrant workers who labored there and sometimes challenged Plant’s anti-union policies. We’ll then follow the story forward to the closing of the plant in the early 1950s, the 1976 fire, and the transformation of the site into the Stop And Shop supermarket and mini-mall in the 1990s.
