On the fourth year Sears Folly was improved with a pump worked by hand. Production was stepped up. The pump continued in use until 1785, then, at a suggestion of Capt. Nathaniel Freeman, John Sears, with the help of others, contrived a pump worked by wind. This really turned the trick and set the skipper off full sail to become the local Croesus. Salt sold at $8 a bushel ($8 was $8 in those times) and the bushels piled higher and higher at the Sears works. By this time the neighbors had gotten sober and interested and other salt-making windmills were erected and their creaking and whirring were familiar sounds throughout the village. The men who assisted John Sears with his windmill improvement eventually reassigned to him their right and title and finally the founder of the salt industry obtained a Government patent. The production of salt spread in other parts of the Cape, notably Provincetown, a great fishing port and, earlier, a whaler’s haven. Salt-making began there in 1800; in 1837 the tip of the Cape had 78 salt works, each employing two men and producing a total of 48,960 bushels of salt. The manufacturing developed even to a higher plan when Glauber Salts, made from boiling brine, was valued by physicians and came into brisk demand. Development of the salt springs of New York, and manufacturing improvements and cheaper operating costs elsewhere, marked the beginning of the end of Cape Cod’s great salt industry. BREWSTER---- _Thanks to Pioneering Here, Millions of American Soldiers Wear Good Shoes_ Quiet little Brewster, Cape Cod, offers a rich tapestry of Americana. Many a U. S. soldier slogging over the world battlefronts is wearing brogans turned out by patented machines of the great United Shoe Machinery--which started from a one-man cobbling business in oldtime Brewster. West Brewster, dubbed “Factory Village” by the old timers, was a bustling scene, with spinning, fulling and grist mills, tannery and iron works, and the still-present Flax Pond, where flax gathered in surrounding fields was put to soak in the water-retting process of making linen. The sheep growers would trek here, over the fields and ragged roads, with their bags of wool. The going was hard on their footwear, it was noted by the Winslow brothers, one of whom operated a fulling mill and the other, a grist mill. So, to maintain good will, the fulling mill Winslow verged into a sideline of cobbling the shoes of his wool producers. But, a teen-age son--who gave the lie to common gossip of that day, that the younger generation was swiftly going to the dogs--was actually the one who transformed the humble cobbler’s tapping into a nationwide whirr and, incidentally, founded the Great Winslow fortune of today. A CROSS-ROADS GENIUS