Shoe pieces.

[Jimmy Langford]

Does anyone else here keep pieces of old shoes they find? I’m a sucker for Edwardian era shoes, even if it’s just the heel of one. I think they are great artifacts

 

[Jimmy Langford]

Here is one I treated today. Vehicle anti-freeze diluted in water and about 4 coats of modge-podge clear spray. Plus a layer of rubber cement on the bottom + another layer of spray (bottom had a problem with flaking). I find it so intriguing the person who wore this, and the places this thing stepped, dates to 100+ years ago. The wear and rocks on the bottom tells a story. This piece of history is saved for generations to come.

 

[nhpharm]

At times we dig hundreds of them in trash pits and privies...I always figure when we see that volume of them that a cobbler/shoemaker much have lived there.

 

[Jimmy Langford]

At times we dig hundreds of them in trash pits and privies...I always figure when we see that volume of them that a cobbler/shoemaker much have lived there.

Have you ever found the metal “lasts” for the cobbler stands? I have found 2 on my own property, which is infamous for 1930s-1980s era junk.

 

[willong]

Does anyone else here keep pieces of old shoes they find? I’m a sucker for Edwardian era shoes, even if it’s just the heel of one. I think they are great artifacts

I used to find them (pieces) quite frequently back when I was digging. I never kept any, though had I found mostly-intact loggers' calk boots I might have. The shoes I always hoped to find, but never did, would have been ox shoes. Logs were skidded along trails of notched cross-logs known as skid roads, which term was later corrupted into "skid row" to mean the poor, run-down part of town during the early days of Pacific Northwest Logging. Horses were also used for skidding and many other purposes, and I certainly kept some of those shoes, particularly if they were large enough to indicate they came from draft animals. However, teams of yoked oxen were the iconic log skidders before the steam donkey yarder entered the woods.

One small dump I dug near the former site of a logging camp/sawmill complex in western WA contained a number of oversized bovine bones, some shoe fragments you would have found interesting, a couple intact heavy mugs and plates typical of what would have been used in a camp's dining hall along with the usual crumbling tin cans and a small assortment of surviving bottles. Early maps of the site did not show the web of railroad spurs emanating from the spot that later 1900's maps would. Personally, I think the large bovine bones, all showing signs of processing into meat cuts such as steaks and roasts, witnessed the final fate of oxen that had either become obsolete when replaced by steam, gotten injured or aged to the point that they no longer pulled their weight.

Site of the photo I have inserted is about thirty miles north of the site that I dug. It shows that ox teams were still skidding logs in Washington's woods in the late 1890's.

 

[embe]

I've heard it was good luck to put old shoes in the wall back in the day...

 

[Mailman1960]

Does anyone else here keep pieces of old shoes they find? I’m a sucker for Edwardian era shoes, even if it’s just the heel of one. I think they are great artifacts
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I have always found them interesting. When I find them I put them aside, and think I'll post little work there good to go, just never did it.