For a time clogs seem to have been in constant use in America; frail morocco slippers and thin prunella and callimanco shoes made them necessary, as did also the unpaved streets. Heavy-soled shoes were unknown for women’s wear. Women walked but short distances. In the country they always rode. We find even Quaker women warned in 1720 not to wear “Shoes of light Colours bound with Differing Colours, and heels White or Red, with White bands, and fine Coloured Clogs and Strings, and Scarlet and Purple Stockings and Petticoats made Short to expose them”—a rather startling description of footwear. Again, in 1726, in Burlington, New Jersey, Friends were asked to be “careful to avoid wearing of Stript Shoos, or Red and White Heel’d Shoos, or Clogs, or Shoos trimmed with Gawdy Colours.”
Brides’ Clogs of Brocade and Sole Leather.
Ann Warder, an English Quaker, was in Philadelphia, 1786 to 1789, and kept an entertaining journal, from which I make this quotation:—
“Got B. Parker to go out shopping with me. On our way happened of Uncle Head, to whom I complained bitterly of the dirty streets, declaring if I could purchase a pair of pattens, the singularity I would not mind. Uncle soon found me up an apartment, out of which I took a pair and trotted along quite Comfortable, crossing some streets with the greatest ease, which the idea of had troubled me. My little companion was so pleased, that she wished some also, and kept them on her feet to learn to walk in them most of the remainder of the day.”
Fairholt, in his book upon costume, says, “Pattens date their origin to the reign of Anne.” Like many other dates and statements given by this author, this is wholly wrong. In Purchas’, his Pilgrimage, 1613, is this sentence, “Clogges or Pattens to keep them out of the dust they may not burden themselves with,” showing that the name and thing was the same then as to-day.
Clogs of “Pennsylvania Dutch.”