Please use the door to the left and enter Tom Plant’s office.
Thomas Gustave Plant was born in 1859 and spent his early years in Bath, Maine. His family was French-Canadian, his parents having immigrated from Quebec years before, and they lived in Bath’s “Canada Hill” neighborhood. Tom had an older half-brother, who struck out on his own early in life, two sisters, Fannie and Agnes, and a younger brother, William, with whom he remained close throughout his life.
Tom was raised in a working-class family in which every person chipped in. He did shoe-making “homework” while still in school. After completing his formal education at age 14, he tried his hand at rope making, ice cutting, and laboring in a boiler shop, before taking an apprenticeship as a shoe laster at a factory in Richmond, Maine. When that factory burned down, Tom moved to Lynn, Massachusetts, and began his climb to management and, eventually, owning his own shoe company.
Tom’s early ventures included investing in shoe-making cooperatives, through which he raised the $22,000 needed to rent a building at Liberty Square in Lynn, and open the Thomas G. Plant Company. He eventually purchased and expanded upon a factory building in Jamaica Plain. Notice the photo of that building hanging on the wall in this room. In addition to employing 5500 people and producing 6 million pairs of shoes annually, that factory was known for its amenities.
Tom Plant practiced welfare capitalism and outfitted his factory complex with a bowling alley, pool hall, library, restaurant, infirmary, and rest park for the benefit and enjoyment of his staff – presumably reasoning that a happy work force is a hard-working work force.
In 1910, Tom Plant sold his company and began his retirement, which means the business he attended to in this office would have only consisted of managing the estate and staff, overseeing his investments, conducting correspondence, and planning his investment and charitable construction projects, including the Bald Peak Colony Club (a country club in nearby Melvin Village) and the Plant Memorial Home (an elderly care facility in his hometown of Bath).
As you look around this room, notice the trophies, all awarded to horses owned by Tom Plant between 1903 and 1910.
Also, notice the rifle rack built into the wall. Tom Plant was an avid outdoorsman, and professed that there was: “Excellent shooting, partridge, coon and deer hunting on the estate, which is in Carroll County, one of the best hunting and fishing counties in New Hampshire.”
