Local city information for Lynn, MA

Lynn is a city in Essex County, Massachusetts, United States. The population was 89,050 at the 2000 census. An older industrial center, Lynn is home to Lynn Beach and Lynn Heritage State Park. Currently, Edward "Chip" Clancy, Jr. is serving his second term as Mayor.

The area known as Lynn was first settled in 1629 by Edmund Ingalls (d. 1647) and incorporated in 1631 as Saugus, the Nipmuck name for the area. The name Lynn was given to the area after King's Lynn, Norfolk, England, in honor of Samuel Whiting.

After Lynn's re-settlement many parts of the town were set off as independent towns. Reading was created in 1644, Lynnfield in 1782, Saugus in 1815, Swampscott in 1852, and Nahant in 1853. Lynn incorporated as a city in 1850.

Colonial Lynn was a major part of the regional tannery and shoe-making industries that began in 1635. The boots worn by Continental Army soldiers during the Revolutionary War were made in Lynn. The shoe-making industry drove urban growth in Lynn into the early nineteenth century. This historic theme is reflected in the city seal, which features a colonial boot.

In 1816 a mail stage coach was operating through Lynn. By 1836, 23 stage coaches left the Lynn Hotel for Boston each day. The Eastern Railroad Line between Salem and East Boston opened on August 28, 1838. This was later merged with the Boston and Maine Railroad and called the Eastern Division. In 1847 telegraph wires passed through Lynn, but no telegraph service station was built till 1858.

Lynn Shoe manufacturers, lead by Charles A. Coffin and Silas Abbott Barton, invested in the early electric industry, specifically in 1883 with Elihu Thomson and his Thomson-Houston Electric Company. That company merged with Edison Electric Company forming General Electric in 1892. Charles A. Coffin served as the first president of General Electric.
Elihu Thomson later served as acting president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1920 to 1923.

Initially the General Electric plant specialized in arc lights, electric motors, and meters. Later they specialized in aircraft electrical systems and components, and aircraft engines were built in Lynn during WWII. That engine plant evolved into the current jet engine plant during WWII because of research contacts at MIT in Cambridge. Gerhard Neumann was a key player in jet engine group at GE in Lynn.. The continuous interaction of material science research at MIT and the resulting improvements in jet engine efficiency and power has kept the jet engine plant in Lynn ever since.

Lynn's population peaked around 1930 at just over 102,000 and population today is roughly where it was in 1910. Yet dindustrialization has meant that median household income for Lynn is well below the statewide average.

Lynn suffered several large fires in the late 1970s and early 1980s, including a devastating inferno among former shoe factories at Broad and Washington Streets on November 28, 1981. The blaze destroyed 17 downtown buildings undergoing redevelopment, with property losses totaling in the tens of millions of dollars. The site has since been largely redeveloped into a satellite campus of North Shore Community College.

Lynn remains home to some of the jet engine division of General Electric, a major employer; as well as West Lynn Creamery (now part of Dean Foods's Garelick Farms unit); C. L. Hauthaway & Sons, a polymer producer; Old Neighborhood Foods, a meat packer; Lynn Manufacturing, a maker of combustion chambers for the oil and gas heating industry; Sterling Machine Co.; and Durkee-Mower, makers of "Marshmallow Fluff."

Infamously known as, "Lynn, Lynn: the city of sin. You never come out, the way you went in," the city of Lynn created an advertising campaign in the early 1990s, to improve the city's image, and help rid the town of that negative slogan. This was the "City Of Firsts" campaign, which boasted that Lynn had the:

• First iron works (1643)
• First fire engine (1654)
• First American jet engine
• First woman in advertising & mass-marketing — Lydia Pinkham
• First baseball game under artificial light
• First dance academy in the U.S.
• First tannery in the U.S.
• First air mail transport in the U.S.

Later, some of these claims were found to be inaccurate or unprovable. For example, the first air mail delivery in the U.S. occurred on Long Island, and the first baseball game under artificial light seems to have actually occurred in Indiana. While the jet engine claim is legitimate, the engine was heavily based on a prior British design.

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