The Bleecker tanneries are one of the Town's most obscure and fascinating mysteries. An industry that commenced in the 1850s and had folded by the dawn of the twentieth century, its mark upon Bleecker remains only in a few lingering place-names and decaying foundations. On 3 September 2013, anthropologist Eliza Jane Darling will present a talk on both the history and the historiography of Bleecker's lost tanneries: what we know about them, and how we know it. With no known images of the tanneries themselves in existence, the talk will focus on the forms of evidence that indicate where they were located, who founded and managed them, what they produced, and how long they operated: census records, genealogical histories, maps, deeds and the slim historical record itself.
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Bleecker Historical Society 