"Gloversville Gloves America" a Gloversville Travel Page by gilabrand

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Rubin Glove Company

I was born in Gloversville and I kid you not - This little town in upstate New York was a major center of glovemaking. Nearly everyone in town made their living from manufacturing or marketing kid gloves. One notable exception, though, was my father. He was the local rabbi.

I lived in Gloversville for the first three years of my life. The only memory I have of it is some grating on the floor of our house. I suppose I remember that because I spent most of the time crawling around on the floor back then.

Unfortunately, my parents, saddled with three small children, did not do much in the way of photography. It never occurred to them to snap pictures of anything but us (and as Child No. 2, born a year after my older brother, there were altogether very few of me).

But here is a picture I found on the Internet of a glove factory on East Fulton Street built in 1920 by Joseph M. Rubin and his 5 sons. Their marketing pitch was "We Glove You."

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Handled with kid gloves

FOR THOSE WITH A GLOVE INTEREST

Amazingly, someone has written a whole book about Gloversville - "Shtetl in the Adirondacks: The Story of Gloversville and its Jews" by Herbert M. Engel, who grew up there in the early 20th century. If you want the inside story on how gloves are made (with all the technical terms) and how one group of new immigrants found their niche in America - this is the book for you.

It goes back to 1760 when Sir William Johnson, the founder of Gloversville, brought glove makers from Perthshire, England, to make deerskin mittens for America's farmers. The Indians taught Johnson how to use the local barks for dying and tanning. Thanks to the plentiful supply of deer hides and the close proximity of streams and lakes for tanning the hides, the industry flourished.