No CrossRef data available.
Article contents
Shoemaking In The Post-Revolutionary Period: The Business Records of Three Cordwainers of Reading, Massachusetts
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 July 2012
Extract
Three manuscripts in the possession of the Reading Antiquarian Society contain information about the business of shoemaking in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. One is the journal of James Weston, from 1788 to 1793; the others are account books of John Goodwin, Jr., and John Johnson, covering a somewhat later period. Each presents its distinctive picture of a shoemaker's work, with interesting contrasts. The career of Goodwin, in particular, illustrates one course of development from workman to businessman, which has been followed by many in past generations. It also demonstrates one reason why class lines have been so hard to draw in American experience. Often a man played both the employer's and the employee's roles at different stages of his own personal history, which not only affected his thinking, but also that of many who aspired to follow his example, and were sure it could be done because they had seen it happen. This transition has become more difficult since the development of the factory and its enormous capital requirements, but, in the days before the centralized workshop, enterprise and imagination were often capital enough to launch a business career.
- Type
- Research Article
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © The President and Fellows of Harvard College 1951
References
1 Given as 2 shillings in the account book.
2 “Kips” are small cattle skins, weighing less than 25 pounds.
3 Cantebury may have stocked leather and shoemakers' supplies to sell to the cordwainers who brought him shoes, as a side line to his main business of selling shoes. For a description of a similar shop, see Hazard, Blanche, The Organization of the Boot & Shoe Industry in Massachusetts before 1875 (Cambridge, 1921), pp. 49–50.Google Scholar
4 The last item has no year in the date as Goodwin wrote it, but it is on the same page with a credit account to Cantebury covering the identical days, and dated 1813.
5 Entered in the account book as 8/6.
6 A blackball was a ball of wax mixed with lampblack, used by the shoeworker to color a finished shoe.
7 However alluring the temptation to give the common meaning to witch in this case, it probably referred to an attachment to a loom, used for fancy weaving.
8 A spring heel was made by inserting one or more lifts of leather under the heel end of a sole which covered the entire bottom of the shoe.
9 For fuller discussion of the development of the central shop, see Hazard, op. cit., Chaps, iii and iv, passim.
10 The Story of Lasts (New York: National Shoe Manufacturers' Association, 1948), p. 3.Google Scholar