By Adrienne Perron
From our March 2022 issue
Shoe manufacturing peaked in Lewiston and Auburn a century ago, a boom before the Depression’s bust, some headline-making strikes, and several disastrous decades of offshoring. In Lewiston, Museum L–A’s new exhibition The Industrial Heart: Enterprise, Innovation, and Creativity celebrates shoemaking on the Androscoggin (plus textile production and brickmaking) with displays of original machinery, oldfangled pumps and loafers, snippets of oral histories, and more. A hundred years since its heyday, the industry’s worn down some tread.
1922
In Auburn alone, then nicknamed “Shoe City,” 12 major factories employ 8,000 workers producing 70,000 shoes a day. It’s the city’s most prolific year of shoemaking.
1937
A strike called by the new United Shoe Workers of America lasts 14 weeks, with workers in L–A demanding higher wages and better working conditions, ultimately unsuccessfully. After violent clashes between police and striking workers, Governor Lewis Barrows calls in the National Guard. Six factories shutter in the aftermath.
1954
Auburn’s Clark Shoe Company launches the Fiancées brand of high-fashion women’s heels. They’re a hit, and Fiancées ads become a staple of women’s magazines throughout the Mad Men era. Collectors covet the shoes today.
1972
A wrecking ball brings down the Cushman-Hollis Company factory, making way for Auburn’s Union Street Bypass. It had once been the world’s largest canvas-footwear manufacturing facility, employing more than 2,000 and producing 20,000 shoes daily.
1973
Auburn’s Falcon Shoe Manufacturing Company makes the first Timberland boots, for New Hampshire’s Abington Shoe Company. Abington later changes its name when its waterproof work boots turn into a global fashion phenomenon, and “Timbs” become a staple of hip-hop culture, worn (and repped in lyrics) by everyone from the Notorious B.I.G. to Nicki Minaj.
1982
Astronauts Hank Hartsfield and Ken Mattingly wear slipper socks made by Lewiston’s Acorn Products Company on NASA’s fourth space-shuttle mission.
1998
Kevin and Kirsten Shorey acquire the Maine heritage brand Quoddy Moccasins, founded in 1947 and all but defunct when the Shoreys rename it Quoddy Footwear. In 2009, they move their Perry shop to Lewiston, lured by a workforce with the skills to cut and stitch by hand.
2011
Governor Paul LePage orders removal of a mural, commissioned for the Maine Department of Labor and painted by MDI artist Judy Taylor, that includes a panel depicting the 1937 L–A shoe strike. A spokesman says the 33-foot mural was “not in keeping with the department’s pro-business goals.” It’s now housed at the Maine State Museum.
2016
U.S. summer Olympians in Rio de Janeiro wear shoes made by Lewiston’s family-run Rancourt & Co. during opening and closing ceremonies. Ralph Lauren Corporation, a Team USA sponsor, also commissions Rancourt to make sneakers for the 2020 Tokyo summer games.
2022
Quoddy, Rancourt, and Globe Footwear (which makes safety boots for firefighters and miners) are L–A’s only footwear manufacturers, carrying on an old-school, shoe-leather legacy.
The Industrial Heart: Enterprise, Innovation, and Creativity runs throughout 2022 at Museum L–A. Bates Mill Complex, 36 Chestnut St. 207-333-3881.
