A Manual of Shoemaking and Leather and Rubber Products

by William H. Dooley

At about the Elizabethan period, shoemaking had really become a very fine art. Some foot creations were made by the Court shoemakers that reflected the individual taste of the monarch, and so great was the competition to produce something novel that very often the styles assumed a grotesque aspect. The toes were elongated so that sometimes they were carried up and fastened by cords and tassels to the tops of the shoes, and it finally became necessary to enact a law to prevent such outrageous types of footwear. The slippers of this period were of the extremely high-heeled variety, and small fortunes were often spent on their ornamentation. They were mostly of the turn-shoe type, and samples which are preserved show the excellent workmanship that was in vogue at that time.

We now come to the first shoemaker in America. When the Mayflower made the second trip to America, she carried among others a shoemaker named Thomas Beard, who brought with him a supply of hides. Seven years afterwards there arrived one Phillip Kertland, a native of Buckinghamshire, who settled in Lynn in 1636.

Kertland was the pioneer shoemaker of Lynn and for years he successfully worked at his craft, teaching others his methods and ways, so that fifteen years after his arrival, Lynn was not only supplying the requirements of its inhabitants, but was also sending a part of its products to the port of Boston. As early as 1648 we find tanning and shoemaking mentioned as an industry of the colony of Virginia, special mention being made of the fact that a planter named Matthews employed eight shoemakers on his premises. Legal restraint was placed on the cordwainer in Connecticut in 1656, and in Rhode Island in 1706, while in New York the business of tanning and shoemaking is known to have been firmly established previous to the capitulation of the Province to England in 1664. In 1698 the industry was carried on profitably in Philadelphia, and in 1721 the Colonial Legislature of Pennsylvania passed an act regulating the material and the prices of the boot and shoe industry.

Prior to 1815 most of the shoes were hand sewed, a few having been copper nailed. The heavier shoes were welted and the lighter ones turned. This method of manufacture was changed, about the year 1815, by the adoption of the wooden shoe peg, which was invented in 1811 and soon came into general use. Up to this time little or no progress had been made in the methods of manufacture. The shoemaker sat on his bench, and with scarcely any other instrument than a hammer, knife, and wooden shoulder stick, cut, stitched, hammered, and sewed until the shoe was completed. Previous to the year 1845, which marked the first successful application of machinery to American shoemaking, this industry was in the strictest sense a hand process, and the young man who chose it for his vocation was apprenticed for seven years, during which time he was taught every detail of the art. He was instructed in the preparation of the insole and outsole, depending almost entirely upon his eye for the proper proportions; taught to prepare pegs and drive them, for the pegged shoe was the common type of footwear in the first half of the last century; and familiarized himself with the making of turned and welt shoes, which have always been considered the highest types of shoemaking, as they require exceptional skill of the artisan in channeling the insole and outsole by hand, rounding the sole, sewing the welt, and stitching the outsole. After having served his apprenticeship, it was the custom for the full-fledged shoemaker to start on what was known as “whipping the cat,” which meant traveling from town to town, living with a family while making a year’s supply of shoes for each member, then moving on to fill engagements previously made.

The change from which has been evolved our present factory system began in the latter part of the 18th century, when a system of sizes had been drafted, and shoemakers more enterprising than their fellows gathered about them groups of workmen, and took upon themselves the dignity of manufacturers.

It was soon found that the master workman could largely increase his income by employing other men to do the work while he directed their efforts, and this gradually led to a division of the labor: the shoe uppers, which had prior to this time been sewed by men using waxed thread with bristles, now were done by women, who often took the work home.

One workman cut the leather, others sewed the uppers, and still others fastened uppers to soles, each workman handling only one part in the process of manufacture.

We find that in the year 1795 the evolution of the factory system had reached a stage where in Lynn alone there were two hundred master workmen, employing six hundred journeymen and turning out three hundred thousand pairs of shoes per year. The entire shoe was then made under one roof, and generally from leather that was tanned on the premises.

Factory buildings were not at this time of a very pretentious nature and did not by any means represent the amount of work undertaken by the proprietor; for the small ten by ten factories, which are even to-day in existence in some of the backyards of Lynn homes, came into existence at this time. Many farmers found that shoemaking was a remunerative occupation in the winter, and they, and perhaps their neighbors, gathered in these shops and took from the different factories shoes on which to fasten the soles, or uppers to bind, which, after completion of the work, were returned to the factory, where they were finished and sent to market packed in wooden boxes. It was in this way that the industry prospered and developed up to the period of the introduction of machines, which happened but a little over half a century ago.