Rebooting history

But tucked away on Washington Street, alongside the George Peabody House - birthplace of the international merchant and philanthropist for whom the city is named - is the most comprehensive collection of artifacts you’ll find about the industry that shaped Peabody and helped jump-start an economy that eventually diversified into retail, high-tech, and medical research.

Built with $550,000 in Community Preservation Act funds, the Peabody Leather Workers Museum opened its doors last week after more than a decade of planning. City officials say it is the first museum dedicated to leather workers and the industry in the United States.

Inside the 3,500-square-foot building, there’s a central exhibition hall with a staking machine and a measuring machine, two intimidating devices that once were vital to the industry. Old photos and wall texts trace its history in the city from 1660, when settlers were first attracted to the area because of the pureness of the brook water, to the early 20th century, when more leather was tanned, finished, and sold here than in any other place in the world.

“It’s our heritage, and we want people who live here - particularly the children - to understand what their grandfathers and grandmothers did so they’d have a comfortable life,’’ explained Peabody Mayor Michael Bonfanti, 65, who comes from a family of leather workers and first worked in a factory when he was 11.

“They spent their hours and days working in these conditions to put bread on the table, and to provide an opportunity,’’ Bonfanti said. “The American Dream was not necessarily for them, it was for the next generation.’’

Throughout the city, there are still reminders of the time when nearly everyone had a member of the family working in a leather factory. Oldtimers still call Peabody Leather City, and Peabody’s athletic teams are called the Tanners.

Inside the museum, a special audiovisual room, complete with original benches taken from the leather workers’ union hall, plays “Leather Soul,’’ a documentary about the industry that is narrated by Studs Terkel.

Other exhibits include samples of the raw and finished leather, ranging from cowhide to rattlesnake skin; an original work whistle from the AC Lawrence Leather Co., which employed around 3,000 at one time; and a slew of photos of immigrants who made Peabody their first stop in America.

They were Turks, Greeks, Jews, Russians, Italians, and Finns, learning a new language, working alongside each other in grimy, noisy factory basements and on assembly lines. For most of the last century, these waves of new immigrants found employment in the more than 100 factories that lined brooks and streams on back roads that led from the current location of the Northshore Mall, into Peabody Square, and alongside the North River, which spilled out into the Atlantic in Salem.

After a hide was cleaned, tanned, softened, and cut - a process that could include up to 100 people handling a single strip of leather - it was shipped out to other factories, where it was made into clothing, shoes, and other accessories. But all that changed in the early 1970s, when new government regulations demanded fewer chemicals and cleaner factory discharge water.

By the 1980s, most block-long tanneries were shuttered, or had burned in massive fires.

Now just a couple of leather factories operate in Peabody, Travel Leather and Alliance Leather.

At the museum, the exhibition’s photos reveal a time when workers had few rights and seemed happy just to have a job. They worked shirtless in basement factories like AB Clark, Korn, and Kirstein, removing hair from the skins, and dipping them into tanning cauldrons.

Others manned an array of machines - many of which were built in Peabody - used to measure, cut, and soften skins into finished work like patent leather. Few noticed the smell of hides and chemicals that hung over the city; no one complained about the smokestacks and soot that turned the downtown gray each afternoon.

“It stunk like hell, but people didn’t fight it, and it was how we lived,’’ said Bob Quinn, who worked for AC Lawrence for 15 years in the 1950s and ’60s. Like Bonfanti, he came from a family of leather workers.

“My father, brother and uncles all worked there, too. I figured out at one time that our family had about 150 or 160 years in total at AC Lawrence.’’

Quinn also shares Bonfanti’s hope that the new museum will serve as the principal educational facility to pass down a seminal period of history to a generation that now recognizes Peabody more for its mall and industrial park.

“It was dirty, hard physical work, ’’ Quinn recalled. Quinn had the mundane job of selecting pickled sheepskin for tanning. Some of it was used for hatbands, jackets, and gloves. “Depending on its thickness and toughness, it could have been used for 30 or 40 different things.’’

Bill Power, chairman of the Peabody Historical Commission and who helped oversee the project, said the city chose to dedicate the museum to workers because of the work ethic the immigrants left to the city.

“This museum is about the workers. They played such an important role in the culture of the city,’’ he said, noting the different churches and social organizations that they helped found, along with their influence in city politics.

Power looks forward to people viewing the factory whistle from the city’s largest tannery, AC Lawrence.

“We were told by a couple of old leather workers that if we blew that whistle, all of the dead leather workers would march up out of the cemeteries and come to work,’’ said Power.

Steven Rosenberg can be reached at srosenberg@globe.com.