Editing Endicott, New York (section)

===The Endicott Johnson Corporation===
The Endicott Johnson Corporation grew out of the Lester Brothers Boot and Shoe Company which began in Binghamton in 1854. In 1890, Lester Brothers along with Lucas Kacynski Co moved their business west to a nearby rural area, which in 1892, was incorporated as the village of Lestershire and in 1916, became Johnson City. Financial problems in 1890 forced the sale of the company to a creditor and fellow shoemaker, Henry Bradford Endicott of [[Massachusetts]], who founded the Endicott Shoe Company and in 1899, made factory foreman [[George F. Johnson]] his partner. The village of Endicott is named after Henry B. Endicott.

George F. Johnson was a brilliant businessman and under his direction the Endicott Shoe Company became very prosperous very quickly. His early adoption of a new machine that could stitch "uppers" to "lowers" was the key to his success, meaning that for the first time in history unskilled labor could manufacture shoes. (Prior to this, shoes were made to individual order by skilled [[shoemaking|cobblers]]. People who couldn't afford this bought used shoes, and had cobblers regularly replace the soles and heels as they wore out, until the uppers disintegrated.)

The orders pouring in made expansion of the shoe company necessary. The next parcel of inexpensive, level land along the railroad and safely above the flood plain was a forested area around what is now the intersection of North Street and Washington Avenue in what is now Endicott. What was by then the Endicott-Johnson Corporation purchased this land and several large tracts around it and built a number of state-of-the-art factories along the railroad line. Anticipating population growth, the company also surveyed and laid out the current street pattern of most of Endicott north of Main Street, so in this sense, Endicott was a "planned community". However, because of an initial lack of housing, from 1900 to 1910 most workers commuted on a horse-drawn streetcar line connecting Johnson City to Endicott along the current route of New York State Route 17C.

Endicott grew and flourished due to massive numbers of immigrants who came to the area to work for "EJ", predominantly from southern and eastern Europe. "Which way EJ?" was said to be what they asked immigration officials at [[Ellis Island]] in New York City, but it is far more likely that they had already memorized the addresses of relatives or friends living in Endicott. The company also maintained recruiting sites in Italy and the [[Balkans]] in the early part of the 20th century. Endicott-Johnson's employment in the region reached a peak of about 20,000 in the early 1920s.

In an innovative and far-sighted policy, George F. Johnson made sections of the company's land holdings outside the factory district available to workers to build homes on, with financing provided by the company, and title reverting to the worker when the loan was paid off. Along with extensive company-provided recreational facilities and medical clinics (unheard of at the time and decades before government took over these responsibilities), this "Square Deal" of the early 20th century is commemorated by stone arches erected by the workers in 1920 across Route 17C (Main Street) at the entrances to Endicott and Johnson City.

Endicott-Johnson was hurt by the [[Great Depression|Depression]] of the 1930s, but since shoes were a necessity, did better than other manufacturing sectors of the economy. Orders for shoes from the military in World War II in the 1940s propelled employment over the peak attained in the early 1920s. Unfortunately, the management of Endicott-Johnson after the death of George F. Johnson in 1948, couldn't cope with a more affluent era in the 1950s and 1960s when footwear became mainly a fashion business in the United States. More importantly, little if any money was invested in improving the original 1900 manufacturing technology, which meant that foreign countries could make the same shoes at a lower price. Loss of market share resulted in the closing and sale of the Endicott factories.