Monthly Archives: September 2016

America was a very different place in 1934 when John J. Burns opened his saw shop in Fall River, Massachusetts. Back then, the storefront was known then as Burns Saw and Machinery Company. It was a time of great uncertainty but Burns knew that the nation would always need builders and those builders would always need a central location to find the sharpest, most powerful tools for their jobs.

Nearby, Boston was booming with building contracts, families spent $11 per week on food and the average price of a house was around $6,000. In the entertainment world, a curly-headed five-year-old named Shirley Temple brightened the gloom with her rendition of "The Good Ship Lollipop." On the news front, the talk around kitchen tables centered on the repeal of Prohibition and the violent ends of gangsters like John Dillinger or Bonnie and Clyde.

Locally, Fall River had grown to be a thriving hub of textile mills but that was on the cusp of changing dramatically. In the bigger picture, the nation was