A Heyday Down East

Whenever we drive through a mid-sized American town that has obviously seen better days, we wonder what industry built the once stately homes that have fallen into gentle disrepair. In most cases, it seems, such towns have fallen victim to the decline in manufacturing—Waterbury's reign as "Brass City," for example, certainly seems like a distant memory. Yet there are also cases in which a town's core industry was built on a dubious fad, such as the turn-of-the-century vogue for patent...