The fire that consumed four old mill buildings on West State Street in Johnstown Thursday brought the Fulton County glove industry back to the front pages.

There is still some limited production of gloves in Fulton County, once home to many mills and home shops producing gloves.

The late historian Barbara McMartin and her husband, W. Alec Reid, wrote a book in 1999 chronicling the glove industry in Johnstown and Gloversville, “The Glove Cities.”

McMartin’s father had been a physician but her great-grandfather, James I. McMartin, started a Johnstown glove shop in 1843. Her grandfathers continued in the trade.

“Glovers were independent people,” McMartin said in an interview in 2001.

McMartin said, “A man who was working as a glove cutter who got angry with his boss could start a glove shop with a pair of scissors and a needle.”

In their book, McMartin and Reid recorded the existence of an astounding 1,900 glove shops in the Johnstown and Gloversville area over the past two centuries. Some shops employed as many as 500 workers, others were true mom and pop operations, with mom sewing gloves and pop cutting them.

McMartin and Reid found that the glove industry actually peaked in 1890 and began its long, slow decline around 1905 in the Glove cities.

Cheaper labor offshore led to a precipitous decline in local glove making after World War II.

McMartin wrote, “Every time the business looked up, something unfortunate happened, usually an outside event over which manufacturers and workers had no control: shortages of skins, lower tariffs, losing home workers, war, more attractive jobs elsewhere, and most important of all, the globalization of manufacturing and cheap overseas labor.”