PRECISION VALLEY: THE MACHINE TOOL COMPANIES OF SPRINGFIFLD VERMONT.

By Wayne G. Broehl, Jr.Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, 1959.274 pp. $5.95.

Northern New England, for many Americans and Mr. Arnold Toynbee, is a region of mountains, scenery, and resorts, inhabited by a thinly scattered population which has found the going too hard to develop a civilized society. Those who know it, beyond such alien towns as Hanover, are well aware of the true facts. There are mountains, but as Ethan Allen once said, even God Almighty cannot make two mountains without putting a valley in between, and in the valleys all sorts of unexpected things can be found. One of these valleys is the subject of Mr. Broehl's well-done book, and it is a valley that has long needed a history.

Springfield, Vermont, is a small industrial town in a rural state. Astride the Black River three or four miles from where it joins the Connecticut, it was once, like dozens of towns around here, using water power to run little mills. Some of these towns, producing shoes or paper or cloth or metal products, have disappeared; others have become cities.

Springfield has stayed small, but it produces one-sixth of the value of manufactures in Vermont and over five per cent of all the machine tools of the country. Its three main plants - Jones and Lamson Machine Company, Fellows Gear Shaper Company, and Bryant Chucking Grinder Company - were not imported from some more "favored" spot, but were created and developed by native Yankees, and run by them, to the immense profit of all concerned, including the United States.

Those who like Vermont history, or the story of real, free-enterprise American business, will find the well-illustrated book an interesting one. Mr. Broehl includes not only the story of the three companies, but their place in the general life of the region and of industrial America, together with a clear description of the peculiar problems of the machine tool business. All this is not easy to do, and if the book at any point falls out of balance, perhaps it is in slighting somewhat the local impact of these industries or in providing what might seem too brief a discussion of labor relations.

Mr. Broehl has made a real contribution to local history and to business history, and ought to go on to some of the other industries of northern New England now that he has made the break from the Ohio truck lines of his earlier book. More studies like this are needed.