Able Men of Boston 1850-1950: The Remarkable Story of the First 100 Years of The Boston Manufacturer's Mutual Fire Insurance Company.

Boston : Boston Manufacturers Mutual Fire Insurance Co., 1950 Hard cover, 8vo in blue cloth with titles in gold blocked to top board and on spine, blue endpapers, frontispiece portrait, rubricated title page, illustrations, 253pp., First Edition. This history of the BMMFIC was written by Dane Yorke, who, coincidentally, in 1942 was employed as a city librarian at the Boston's MacArthur Library, and is recorded as participating in a city-twinning broadcast on short wave radio WRUL between Biddeford, Maine and Bideford, Devon, Great Britain, as seen in a press cutting from the MacArthur Library. These broadcasts were considered an important source of morale for the populace of both countries during WW II. (See MacArthurArchivesdotorg). **The present work by this author, however, is a significant and very readable history of Boston industry, and the development of the civic infrastructure that supported it. Topics such as the first public water system in the United States are addressed, as a necessary forerunner to the works of the BMMFIC. A biography of the organization's first President, James Read (b. 1789) forms a portion of the book, with anecdotes of characters of Old Boston of the early nineteenth century. There are histories of mill fires, including one at the the Essex Steam Mill Newburyport in 1856, and the notorious Boston Fire of 1872, and the organization of mutual aid. CONDITION: Near Fine. Faint rubbing at front hinge. Lacking glassine, now in mylar. . First Edition. Hard Cover. Near Fine.