Images courtesy of Historic New England
Provincetown’s History Told Through Artifacts
by Steve Desroches
The world’s oldest known shoe was found in Fort Rock Cave in Oregon and is believed to date from between 10,500 to 9200 BCE. Footwear has, of course, since grown from a utilitarian way to provide protection to a personal expression of art, culture, athletics, and more. It’s a global human innovation with a deep story behind every pair, be it manufacturing, design, class status, function, or style. Shoes are a huge part of the manufacturing history of New England with mill towns throughout the region when the advent of the Industrial Revolution had factories mass-producing footwear for the nation.
That is in part why Historic New England, the country’s oldest historic preservation organization, has one of the largest historical shoe collections in the world. Its collection features Native American footwear that pre-date the arrival of Europeans all the way through to today. There are ballet slippers that once belonged to a ballerina from the Boston Ballet. There are sneakers from JEMS, the first Black-owned athletic shoe company in the country, based in Somersworth, New Hampshire. Nineteenth-century silk shoes from China that were popular in Boston’s Chinatown. Bronzed baby shoes from the 1940s, signifying a popular trend to commemorate a child’s infancy. Shoes worn by a soldier in the Revolutionary War. A pair of purple suede sandals worn at a “hippie wedding” in the Berkshires in 1973. A classic pair of black canvas Chuck Taylor All Stars. And then there are these shoes: a set of marabou high heels and a pair of silver glitter high heel boots, both worn at parties and drag events in Provincetown. These shoes have appeared in various exhibitions featuring Historic New England’s shoe collection, including this past spring’s Shoe Stories: Past, Present, Future at its Haverhill Center for Preservation and Conservation, to help illustrate the story of Provincetown’s LGBTQ culture, drag and costuming in the town, as well as its creative spirit and flair.
