The Shoe Town
Step into the dooryard of almost any Hopkinton farm in the years around 1850 and there stood, set a little apart from the house, a small wooden building hardly bigger than a corn crib. It might have a single window for the light, a small stove for the cold months, a bench worn smooth, and a litter of leather scraps on the floor. This was the shoe shop. It was not a factory and it was not a store. It was a workshop in the yard, as ordinary a part of the farmstead as the barn or the well, and the man who owned the farm worked in it through the part of the year when the land could spare him. The fields lay frozen or fallow. The cows wanted little. So the farmer went out to his shop in the morning, took up the awl and the hammer and the lapstone, and made shoes.
An official survey of the town made in 1831 by a surveyor named Matthew Metcalf showed a farming town with mills on its streams. It did not show the small dark fact that was about to remake how Hopkinton earned its living. That fact lived in the dooryards. It was a trade carried on by hand, in winter, by men whose census trade was farmer and whose second trade, half the year, was shoemaker. The vital records that named those men showed when they were born and married and buried. For the work itself, for the shoe and the shop and the long change that turned a town of farmers into a town of factories, the surviving record rests on a single faithful witness, and on the silent evidence of the maps.
The witness is a printed sketch of one Hopkinton man, set down in William Richard Cutter's Historic Homes and Places of Middlesex County (1908), a volume that preserves a great deal of the town's history. The man was Michael Raftery. His own life story, where he came from and what he founded, belongs to a later turn in his own biography. Here he matters for one reason only. The sketch of his life, in describing how he made his living, pauses to describe the shoe trade of Hopkinton as it stood when he came into it, and then describes how that trade changed across the whole of his long life in the town. Those few sentences are the spine of the shoe trade's story. They are nearly the only connected account that survives, from a source that knew the town, of how the shoe came to Hopkinton, how it rose, and how it began to fall. The period atlases, discussed further on, corroborate the industry's geography, confirming where the trade stood on the ground even though they leave its economic detail to the sketch alone.
The witness speaks plainly. When the sketch describes the Hopkinton that Raftery entered in the middle of the century, it says that at that time almost every farm had its shoe shop and almost every man followed the trade of shoemaker, at least for a part of each year. A whole vanished economy is folded inside that sentence. Almost every farm. Almost every man. The shoe shop was not the property of a few specialists. It was as common in the town as the plow. And the shoemaking was not a man's whole occupation. It was the trade he followed for a part of each year, the part when farming released him, so that across the calendar a Hopkinton man was a farmer in one season and a shoemaker in another, the two trades braided together into a single working life.
The phrase farm-shop system can sound tidier than the thing it names. There was nothing tidy about it. It was scattered, domestic, and seasonal. The leather came into the town from the dealers and the tanners. It was given out to the men in the shops, who worked it up in their dooryards over the winter, and the finished work was gathered back in. A single pair of shoes might pass through more than one shop and more than one pair of hands before it was done, for the trade was already divided into separate skills, and a man learned the skill that suited him or that his neighbor could teach him. The sketch names two of those skills exactly. Raftery, it says, learned the trades of crimping and bottoming in the little shops of Hopkinton. There is the texture of the thing, in two old words.
Crimping and bottoming are worth pausing over, because they are the most concrete detail the sources give about the actual labor, and behind each word stands a man at a bench. To crimp was to take the upper leather, the part of the shoe or boot that would rise over the foot and ankle, and to work it wet over a wooden form so that it took and held the curved shape it needed, the leather bent and dried and set to the line of the last. It was skilled and particular work, for leather forced wrongly would crack or wrinkle and the whole upper be spoiled. To bottom was the other great half of the craft, the joining of the sole to the upper, the building of the part the foot stands on, the stitching or pegging or nailing that bound the bottom of the shoe to the body of it and made the loose pieces into a thing a person could walk in. The pegging itself traced back to a Hopkinton man. In 1818, a local resident named Joseph Walker is credited, though the evidence behind the credit is thinner than the fame it earned him, with inventing the wooden shoe peg, a simple hand-driven pin that fastened a sole to an upper faster than sewing ever could. It was a crude device at first, each peg still driven by hand, but multiple independent trade histories trace the whole later shift toward pegged rather than sewn construction back to this one Hopkinton innovation, decades before the day of machinery finished what Walker's peg had started. A crimper shaped the shoe. A bottomer made it hold together and bear weight. Between them, with the cutters and the stitchers and the finishers, they made the whole, and they made it by hand, in small buildings, in a country town, in the winter.
And they learned it, the sketch says, in the little shops of Hopkinton. That phrase is its own quiet argument. The skill was not brought in ready-made from a city or a school. It was passed from hand to hand and bench to bench in the dooryards of the town itself, a man learning crimping from the neighbor who knew it, learning bottoming from another, the trade reproducing itself across the farms the way a dialect or a tune is handed down. A boy grew up watching his father at the lapstone and took up the awl himself almost without being taught. The little shops were the town's school of the trade, and what they taught was a craft that could be carried in the hands and set up wherever a man had a bench and a window and a part of the year to spare.
The farm-shop system was not a crude thing waiting to be improved. It was a shrewd and humane fit between the land and the work. New England farming, on the rocky upland soils of a town like Hopkinton, could not by itself keep a family the year round. The growing season was short and the ground was hard, and a man with a farm and a family needed a way to turn the idle winter months into money. The shoe was the answer the region found. It needed little capital, only leather and a few tools and the skill in the hands. It could be done at home, in the off season, without leaving the farm or the family. It turned the dead time of the year into earnings, and it did so without uprooting anyone. A man stayed a farmer, kept his land and his name and his place in the town, and added to all of that a winter trade that brought in cash. The braiding of farm and shop was not a makeshift. It was, for a couple of generations, a way that a hardscrabble town could prosper without anyone having to choose between the land and a wage.
The witness's own words give the measure of how widespread the trade was: almost every farm, almost every man. The picture is of a whole town at work in its dooryards. Not one shoe shop or a dozen but scores of them, a small wooden building behind farmhouse after farmhouse along the roads that Metcalf had mapped, smoke rising from their little stoves on winter mornings, the tap of the hammer and the pull of the waxed thread going on inside while the snow lay on the fields. A traveler down a Hopkinton road in January would have passed shop after shop, each with its one man or its two or three, each turning out its share of the town's winter work. The whole of Hopkinton, in the cold months, was something like a single great workshop scattered across a hundred dooryards. That is the picture the words almost every farm and almost every man point to: the making of the town's prosperity and the seed of everything that came after.
For out of that scattered domestic trade there grew, step by step, something more concentrated, and the witness records the turn. After describing the little shops where Raftery learned his crimping and bottoming, the sketch goes on to say that at length he began to manufacture shoes in his own shop. There is the hinge of the whole story, caught in a single phrase. To manufacture shoes in his own shop is a different thing from following the trade of shoemaker for a part of the year. The man who manufactures is no longer only a workman at a bench. He is the one who takes in the leather, who employs or directs the hands, who sees the work through from the stock to the finished pair and out to the market, and who carries the risk and takes the profit. He has become, in the old and exact sense of the word, a manufacturer, one who makes by hand but makes at scale, gathering the once-scattered craft into a single enterprise under one roof and one name.
Raftery made a success of it. For twenty-five years, the sketch says, he was a successful shoe manufacturer. What the fact shows, and shows clearly, is the shape of the change. Here was a Hopkinton man who began as so many began, learning crimping and bottoming in the little shops of the town, and who did not stay a winter workman but rose to manufacture shoes in his own shop and to make a quarter-century's success of it. His individual story is the general story in miniature. The trade was passing out of the dooryards and gathering into the hands of men who would manufacture, men who turned a seasonal craft into a standing business. Raftery is the one named example of that rising class of Hopkinton manufacturers, and the sketch puts him forward not as a curiosity but as a representative figure, the small farm-shoemaker grown into the owner of an enterprise.
The same shoe-manufacturing town also built itself a reputation of a different kind, one no atlas would think to map. Beginning in the 1830s, Hopkinton residents organized a local antislavery society, meeting regularly in a building on Hayden Row that had begun life in 1816 as the town's first Methodist church. Families named Fitch, Bowker, Phipps, Davenport, Wales, and Claflin were prominent among the members, Amos Albee served as secretary, and the group sent delegates to county and state antislavery conventions. Samuel Dexter Wales, a Hopkinton shoemaker who kept a diary through these years, recorded regular trips to hear speakers the state antislavery society sent to raise money and rally support for immediate abolition, the position that slavery ought to end at once rather than gradually. The Claflin name among them belonged to Lee Claflin, born in Hopkinton in 1791. He was one of the shoe manufacturers who had built the town's industry, and abolition sat alongside shoemaking as one of his causes. He personally financed the building of the town's Methodist church, helped found the Hopkinton National Bank, and later co-founded Boston University. His son William, born nearby in Milford, married a Hopkinton woman, Mary Bucklin Davenport, in 1845, built the grand house on Hayden Rowe Street that still stands as his father's home, and went on to serve as the twenty-seventh Governor of Massachusetts from 1869 to 1872, one of the shoe trade's fortunes carried, within a single generation, from a Hopkinton factory floor to the State House.
The lecturers who came to Hopkinton included some of the movement's best-known voices: William Lloyd Garrison, Lucy Stone, Abby Kelley, Charles Remond, and the Milford reformer Adin Ballou. The most notable visitor arrived on April 29, 1842. Frederick Douglass, twenty-four years old and not yet two years into his career as a paid lecturer for the Massachusetts Antislavery Society, had escaped slavery in Maryland only four years before. Listeners who heard Douglass elsewhere on the Massachusetts circuit that same season described him in terms usually reserved for the movement's most seasoned speakers. Hopkinton's engagement with the cause did not end with a single lecture. In 1843 a petition against state cooperation with slave catchers circulated through Massachusetts and gathered 322 signatures from the town alone, out of nearly 65,000 statewide; the law it sought passed. A second petition in 1850, opposing the federal Fugitive Slave Act, carried 170 Hopkinton names, including the shoe manufacturer Erastus Thompson and a dozen or so women. Douglass himself wrote once more to the town nearly two decades later, a letter of thanks in 1859 to "the Ladies of Hopkinton" for clothing and money sent to aid formerly enslaved people making their way to Canada, a letter still held by descendants of one of the antislavery society's own founding families.
The named companies, the annual output, the payrolls, and the full timeline of the trade, the material a complete industrial history of Hopkinton would be built from, live in town reports, trade directories, and the inventory forms of later surveys, a rich body of records for a future researcher to bring together.
What the witness does give, and gives with real force, is the next turn of the wheel, the turn from rise to decline, and here the few sentences open out into the largest movement of the whole story. After telling how Raftery prospered as a manufacturer in his own shop, the sketch says this. Then came the day of machinery and the concentration of the business in large factories, where by the use of steam power and the newly invented machines the old hand-made shoes were driven out of the field, and all the little shops finally closed. There, in a single sweeping line set down by a man who lived to see it happen, is the end of the world the dooryard shops had built.
The day of machinery. The phrase has the ring of a remembered turning point, and so it was. For two generations the shoe had been made by hand, with the awl and the hammer and the waxed thread, in the little shops where Raftery had learned his crimping and bottoming. Then the machines came. The sketch names their power and their nature exactly, and both halves of that matter. Steam power meant that the work no longer turned on the strength and the time of a man's own arms. It turned on an engine that ran all day without tiring, that could drive a whole hall of machines at once, that asked only to be fed and stoked. And the newly invented machines meant that the old hand skills, the crimping and the bottoming that a man had spent years learning in the dooryard shops, could now be done by a device, faster and more uniformly than any hand could do them, by a worker who tended the machine rather than mastered the craft. The two together, steam and machine, broke the old trade at its root. The skill that had lived in the hands and passed from bench to bench was now built into iron, and the iron ran on steam.
The consequence the sketch states without flinching. The old hand-made shoes were driven out of the field. There is no softening it and the witness does not try. The hand-made shoe, the very thing the farm shops existed to produce, could not compete with the machine-made shoe. It cost more to make and took longer and came out less uniform, and once the factory shoe was on the market the dooryard shoe had no place left to go. Driven out of the field is the language of a rout, and a rout it was. The men in the little shops were not making a worse shoe out of carelessness. They were making the only shoe their hands and their tools could make, and that shoe was simply overtaken, in price and in speed, by a shoe that no longer needed their hands at all.
And so the buildings emptied. All the little shops finally closed. The shops did not all close in a day. Finally closed, the sketch says, and the word carries a slow attrition, shop after shop falling quiet across the years as the work drained away to the factories, until the small wooden buildings in the dooryards stood empty or were put to other uses or pulled down, and the trade that had once been carried on in almost every farm in Hopkinton was carried on there no longer at all.
The sketch even pauses on the human choice this forced, in a sentence about Raftery that speaks for many. The small manufacturers, it says, had to choose between the factory and the farm. They no longer went together. There is the whole loss in a phrase. The farm and the shop had gone together for two generations, the one keeping a man on his land and the other paying him through the winter, and the day of machinery split them apart. A man could now work in a large factory for a wage, under another man's roof and another man's clock, or he could keep his farm, but he could no longer do both in the old braided way, because the trade that had let him do both had moved indoors and gone to steam. Raftery himself, the sketch says, made the older choice and preferred the farm, and on his rocky Hopkinton acres he made farming pay and raised his family and held his land. But the choice itself was the new thing, and the need to make it was the sign that the old world was over. Where once a Hopkinton man had simply been both farmer and shoemaker as a matter of course, now he had to choose, and most who chose the shoe chose the factory, and the dooryard shop became a memory.
The forces that move an industry from one town to another, the search for cheaper labor or cheaper power or nearer markets, the failures and consolidations and removals that close a factory in one place and open one in another, are the ordinary weather of manufacturing, and any or all of them may have worked on Hopkinton. The witness gives the fact, plainly and a little sadly, that the industries had fallen off and some of the large factories had been closed. No cause is named. The exact firms, the exact years, the exact reasons, sit in the same body of town reports and trade records that hold the figures of the rise, material for a future researcher to bring together. A town rose on the shoe and then partly fell on it, lifted and then lowered by the same machinery, and the man whose life sketch tells of all this lived long enough to see both the height and the decline.
There is one more body of evidence to set beside the witness, silent but solid, and it locates the industrial town on the ground. The maps. Where the sketch gives the story of the trade through time, the period atlases give the town in space at two fixed moments, and on them the industrial Hopkinton can be seen settled into its districts. The first is the Middlesex County atlas published in 1875 by F. W. Beers, a cadastral survey that drew the town village by village with the property owners named, its centerfold plate showing the north part of Hopkinton and, on the reverse, the south part along with Woodville and Hayden Row. The second is the atlas published in 1889 by the Walker firm, which mapped the village of Hopkinton with its streets and its schools and its churches, its railroad and its cemeteries, lot by lot, alongside a companion plate of Woodville. Between them the two atlases bracket the very years of the town's height as a shoe town, and they show where that height was housed.
The atlases record what the farm-shop world never could, a town no longer scattered evenly across its dooryards but gathered into named and distinct villages: North Hopkinton and South Hopkinton, Woodville, and Hayden Row. That last name is the one that matters most for the industrial story, for Hayden Row was the factory quarter, the part of the town where the concentration of the business in large factories the sketch spoke of had come down onto the actual ground. Where the day of machinery gathered the trade out of the dooryards and into the great steam-driven halls, it gathered it into places, and Hayden Row was such a place, a factory district set apart from the older farm village, the visible answer on the map to the witness's account of concentration. The little shops had been everywhere and so had appeared nowhere in particular on a map. The factories were somewhere, and the somewhere had a name.
The atlas plates confirm that by the 1870s and 1880s Hopkinton was a town of distinct settled villages with an industrial quarter at Hayden Row, which is exactly the townscape the witness's account of large factories would lead one to expect. The maps confirm and locate what the witness describes. The shoe had a place in Hopkinton, and the place was Hayden Row, and the atlases set it down.
The spine is sound and the shape is true, set down by a witness who knew the town and confirmed in its districts by the maps. Hopkinton became a shoe town. It rose on the craft that its farmers carried in their hands through the winters, it climbed into the front rank of the trade in its state, and it was lifted and then lowered by the same machinery that ended the world of the dooryard shop. The little buildings behind the farmhouses fell silent. The factories rose at Hayden Row and ran on steam, and then in their turn some of them closed. A single printed sketch of one old man, kept in a genealogical volume that never set out to write the history of an industry, turns out to hold nearly the whole of what can be known about how the shoe came to Hopkinton, and how, having come, it began to go.