The white building in the foreground was a shoe shop and part of the David Cummings & Company Shoe Factory complex. The large brick buildings in the background comprise the David Cummings & Co. Factory, where, by the late nineteenth century, about 350 men and women manufactured nearly 5000 pairs of shoes per day.

The factory building still (as of 2016) stands on Norton Street in South Berwick. The Cummings factory building on Norton Street was constructed about 1872. It later operated as the South Berwick Shoe, Inc., and, finally, as the Duchess Shoe Company. The building lost all ties to the shoe manufacturing trade in the early 1990s, when it was renovated into an apartment complex.