Fred A Gannon

Did you know that a 1651 act of the Massachusetts General Court authorizing the shoemakers of Boston to form a shoemaker's organization stipulated that, "no shoemaker shall refuse to make shoes for any inhabitant, at reasonable rates, of their own leather for use of themselves and families if they be required thereunto?" I did not know that -- until I read this book. Apparently, prior to this enactment, Boston shoemakers were in the habit of denying service to customers who supplied their own leather. This provision goes hand in hand with the injunction that a tanner could not make shoes, a shoemaker could not make leather, and a butcher could not do either. (Would you want someone to run you up a new pair of pumps right after he'd finished slaughtering a hog?) It's pretty clear to me that the Court was in the pocket of Big Tanning.… (meer)

While the names of Thomas Beard, Isaac Rickerman and Philip Kertland may not be as celebrated as John Winthrop or Miles Standish, these worthies were personages of no little significance to the success of the American experiment in freedom, since, as the nation's first resident shoemakers, they were essential in enabling their countrymen to overcome the rough lands of the New World, which, with its rude roads and paths, when they even existed, wore out even the strongest boots, imported with great difficulty from the mother countries; so much so that Beard and Rickerman were considered so valuable to the colony at Salem that they were to have their board and houseroom at the expense of the colony, and Kertland was granted ten acres of land by Lynn, an area in Massachusetts whose name was given it after King's Lynn, Norfolk, England, in honor of Samuel Whiting, while the little town of Reading granted its first shoemaker, whose name, regrettably, has been lost in the mists of history, "rights to wood and herbage," meaning that he could gather from the town lands such wood as he wished for fuel and herbs as he wished for medicine without cost, thus making shoe making one of the first, if not the first, subsidized industries in our nation and ushering in the tide of socialism in which we are now awash.… (meer)