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THE
LEATHERWORKER
in Eighteenth-Century
_WILLIAMSBURG_
Being an Account of the Nature of Leather, & of the Crafts commonly
engaged in the Making & Using of it.
_Williamsburg Craft Series_
_WILLIAMSBURG_
Published by _Colonial Williamsburg_
MCMLXXVIII
_The Leatherworker
in Eighteenth-Century_ Williamsburg
[Illustration: Illustrated capital]
Once upon a time there lived in France a poet-bureaucrat by the name of
Charles Perrault, who wrote fairy tales. He called one of them
_Cendrillon ou la Petite Pantoufle de Verre_, and ever since 1697, for
that was the date of Cinderella’s appearance in modern literature, her
glass slippers have been a puzzle.
Not to children, of course. Generations of youngsters have
matter-of-factly accepted as the most natural thing in the world that
magic slippers should be of glass (_verre_). Their elders, however,
being less sophisticated about such things, have learnedly quibbled over
whether the slippers weren’t really supposed to be of _vair_, the costly
white squirrel fur once worn only by royalty.
After all, logic and reason and custom and tradition say that footwear
has been made of leather since time unknown. And who ever heard of
making shoes out of glass?
Well, who ever heard of making bottles out of leather, for that matter?
Or of fire hose made of leather? Or of leather cannons?
Yet leather has been put to these and many other uses over the centuries
of recorded history. A list of them would be almost endless, and so
would a list of the sources of leather. The following compilation,
doubtless far from complete, could have been (it was not) drawn up by an
English eighteenth-century or colonial American leatherworker:
_SOURCES_
cow
ox
calf
horse
sheep
lamb
goat
kid
pig
dog
wolf
deer
elk
antelope
moose
buffalo
bear
wildcat
rabbit
muskrat
beaver
alligator
rattlesnake
_USES_
Clothing
shoes, boots, moccasins, galoshes
leggings, breeches, aprons
shirts, coats, caps, hats, gloves
belts, suspenders, points and laces
fur items, fur trim
Shelter and furnishings
tents, tepees
wall hangings, door curtains
chair seats and backs, beds
upholstery, cushion covers
fur rugs, fur bedding
Transportation
saddles, bridles, harness (including that for human porters)
carriage upholstery, wagon covers
scupper leathers, antichafing binding on sailing gear
Containers, liquid
wineskins, waterbags, bottles
jugs, mugs, buckets
inkwells and inkhorns
hoses, pipes
Containers, dry
bags, purses, food pouches
trunks, boxes, caskets, coffers
snuff boxes, dice cups
Military items
shields, scabbards, sheaths
bowcases, quivers, gun buckets
helmets, cartridge boxes
powder horns and buckets
Other
bookbinding, parchment, vellum
hornbooks, bellows, hinges
pump washers, airtight floats
spinning-wheel belts
cricket balls, drumheads, banjos
surgical trusses
Leather differs not only according to the species of creature it comes
from but according to the age and sometimes the sex of the animal, and
also the part of the animal’s body it once covered. Its characteristics
vary depending on the type of processing it undergoes—whether by liming,
tanning, tawing (mineral tanning), or shamoying (oil tanning)—and
depending on how these processes are varied and combined.
Leather can be stiff as bone or supple as silk, nearly as waterproof as
rubber or capable of sopping up water like a sponge, tough and
unyielding or resilient and stretchy, smooth and translucent as paper,
deeply grained in many patterns, or softly napped. It may be snowwhite
or range through hues of tan and red to dark brown. It may be molded,
carved, and colored in endless array. As leatherworkers for many
centuries have been fond of reminding the world, “There’s nothing like
leather.”
_THERE’S NOTHING LIKE TANNING_
Homer’s _Iliad_ contains what may be the earliest surviving literary
reference to leathermaking. Describing the swaying fight for possession
of Patroclus’s corpse, the author (in Pope’s translation) wrote:
As when the slaughter’d bull’s yet reeking hide,
Strain’d with full force, and tugged from side to side
The brawny curriers stretch; and labour o’er
The extended surface, drunk with fat and gore....
The untidy process here alluded to as currying was doubtless one of
man’s first methods of making leather. It consisted of laboriously
working into a hide or skin such greasy and albuminous substances as
animal fats, brains, blood, milk, and so forth. The product, although
technically not “leather,” had many of leather’s characteristics; this
is a paradox that calls for some definitions. In the terminology of the
trade:
Hides are the pelts of the larger animals—cattle, horses, buffalo,
elephants, and so on;
Skins come from smaller animals—calves, sheep, goats, pigs, deer,
beaver, etc.—and from birds, fish, and reptiles;
Leather is any hide or skin _after it has been tanned_.
As the legislature of colonial Virginia put it in 1691 (in an act that
will shortly engage our attention again):
And for the avoyding of all ambiguities and doubts, which may and doe
grow and arise upon the difinition and interpretation of this word
leather, _Be it enacted and declared_, that hydes and skinns of oxe,
steer, bull, cow, calfe, deer, goats and sheep being tann’d shall be,
and ever hath been reputed and taken leather.
The key word is “tanned.” Like any organic matter, skins and hides will
soon begin to decay unless they receive some kind of preservative
treatment. They may be simply scraped and sundried—or salted or smoked
or soaked in brine or in slaked lime. From some of these processes may
come extremely tough and durable products—rawhide, parchment, and vellum
are limed—but they are not leather because they have not been _tanned_.
[Illustration: _Taneur_ _This illustration from Diderot’s great
eighteenth-century French encyclopedia shows the essential
operations in a tannery: A) washing hides in a stream; B) scraping
hair or flesh from a hide on the “beam”; C) soaking hides in a
series of lime pits; D) bedding hides in a tanning vat with a layer
of shredded bark between each hide; E) stirring lighter hides in a
hot water tanning solution._]
Tanning brings about within the fibrous structure of a pelt certain
chemical and physical rearrangements that are still imperfectly
understood. Their effect, however, is to render the pelt permanently
imputrescible, pliable when dry, and capable of sustaining repeated
wetting without hurt. The agents responsible for the transformation,
known as “tannins,” are found in almost all plants, in certain minerals,
and in various readily oxidizing oils.
_TANNING AND CURRYING_
The ancient Sumerians, Babylonians, Assyrians, Egyptians, central
Asians, and Chinese all knew tanned leather and used it. But who first
discovered how to tan it, when that happened, and where, must remain
forever unanswered, since the invention of tanning came before the
invention of written records. Primitive leatherworkers probably stumbled
on different processes at different times and places, and quite possibly
a number of widely separated workers discovered the same processes
independently.
Until the invention of chrome tanning in the second half of the
nineteenth century, little change had taken place in the three basic
tanning methods for at least two thousand years. The most widely
practiced method involved the use of vegetable tannins. Occidental
tanners employed oak bark, gallnuts, and sumac leaves among their chief
sources; other plants rich in tannins are found in every continent.
Mineral tanning with alum, called “tawing,” has been in use since
earliest time in Babylonia, Egypt, and probably China. Because the
leather so made is snow white, workers in this specialty gained the name
of “whitetawyers.” Tawed leather, although soft and stretchy, is very
strong; quite appropriately, one of his eighteenth-century
contemporaries described Richard Bland, the Williamsburg lawyer and
political pamphleteer, as “staunch & tough as whitleather.”
Currying—whatever it may have meant to Homer (or to Alexander Pope)—is
not a method of preparing hides and skins from fresh-slaughtered
animals, but a complex of processes for treating leather already tanned.
These processes include smoothing the leather, paring it down to even
thickness overall, especially working fatty matter into it for pliancy
and water resistance, and giving it whatever surface dressing, color,
and finish its intended use calls for. Prominent among such uses in the
eighteenth century were shoe uppers, harness and saddlery, upholstery,
trunkmaking, and bookbinding.
[Illustration: _Two styles of carriage harness, one quite elaborate,
the other fairly simple; both of the “breast-collar” rather than the
now more familiar “neck-collar” type._ Diderot.]
_CHIEF LEATHER CRAFTS_
A list compiled in London in 1422 recorded 111 groups or guilds of
merchants and craftsmen then active in that city. Fourteen of these
concerned themselves with leather or with articles made of it in large
part:
cofferers
cordwainers
curriers
girdlers
glovers
leather dyers
leathersellers
loriners (or lorimers)
malemakers
pouchmakers
saddlers
skinners
tanners
whitetawyers
Of these, only tanners, curriers, cordwainers, and saddlers showed up
prominently in colonial Virginia—although always as individual
craftsmen, not as members of an organized craft or guild.
Cordwainers—the word comes from cordovan, a kind of sumac-tanned leather
much favored in medieval England and made originally in the Spanish city
of Cordoba—were shoemakers. The craft is to be carefully distinguished
from that of cobbling, which is the mending of shoes. Although
practically all colonial Virginia shoemakers also did shoe repairing,
the trade of cobbling was looked on, especially by cordwainers, as
inferior in status.
Curiously, the initial groups of colonists sent to Jamestown by the
Virginia Company lacked any leather craftsmen. Somehow the London
“adventurers” thought that the real adventurers to America could get
along without tanners, curriers, or shoemakers. Just how the colonists
were expected to acquire shoes grows even more puzzling in light of the
English law that forbade exportation of goods made of English leather.
In a few years, however, some tanners and shoemakers had been sent over
and were at work in Jamestown. But not enough of them came or else (as
is more likely) they abandoned their trades to grow tobacco. A 1625
report declared that an extreme shortage of shoes and other apparel
endangered the health of the population. Soon thereafter the Virginia
Assembly took the first of many steps to promote leathermaking and other
manufactures in the colony.
Sometimes with the support of the home government, sometimes without,
the assembly passed laws in 1632, 1645, 1658, 1660, 1662, 1680, and 1682
forbidding the export from Virginia of hides, skins, and certain other
commodities. They hoped in this way to assure ample supplies of the raw
materials and thus encourage colonial craftsmen to make more of the
needed products.
The legislation, in actuality, had less effect in Virginia than in
England. Colonial craftsmen continued to prefer leathers imported from
England, reputed to be the best of their kinds, for quality work—and to
prefer tobacco growing to leatherworking anyway. But English merchants
and craftsmen repeatedly protested the threat of competition in a market
they felt belonged solely to them, so each colonial law in turn was
either repealed on orders from London or simply allowed to lapse.
The 1662 effort, somewhat more elaborate than the others, had no greater
success in the end. At Jamestown the legislature that year passed three
laws intended to increase local manufactures. One barred the export of
hides, wool, and iron; another exempted from taxation any craftsman who
followed his trade and did not plant tobacco; the third required each
county in the colony of Virginia to erect “one or more tanhouses, and
... provide tanners, curryers and shoemakers, to tanne, curry and make
the hides of the country into leather and shoes.” The manager of this
trade for each county was to allow the people two pounds of tobacco for
each pound of dry hide they brought to the tannery, and “sell them shoos
at thirty pounds of tobacco [for] plaine shoos, and thirty five pounds
of tobacco for [shoes with] wooden heels and ffrench falls of the ...
largest sizes, and twenty pounds of tobacco per pair for the smaller
shoos.”
[Illustration: _Cordonier_ _As the shoemaker needed an assortment of
lasts on which to make shoes of differing sizes and shapes, so the
bootmaker needed “boot legs” resembling his customers’ calves. The
engraving also shows a variety of eighteenth-century boot styles,
the more formidable being heavy military boots._ Diderot.]
_BEFORE FREE ENTERPRISE_
The seventeenth century ended with legislation of a different tenor. “An
act declareing the dutie of Tanners, Curriers and Shoemakers,” passed in
1691, regulated working procedures and set quality standards to an
extent remarkable even at a time when detailed governmental regulation
of economic activity was normal.
Tanners, this law decreed, were not to leave hides too long in the
lime-pits, nor put them into the tan-vats until they had been thoroughly
cleansed of lime; curriers were not to work “any hyde or skin not being
thoroughly dry,” and were not to skimp on the amount or quality or
freshness of the grease they used in currying; cordwainers or shoemakers
were to use only leather that was “well and truly tann’d and curryed,”
and were to make their boots, shoes, and slippers “well and
substantially sewed with good thread well twisted and made, and
sufficiently waxed with wax well rosined, and the stitches hard drawn
with handleathers.”
The law further required each county to appoint searchers to examine all
hides, skins, leather, and leather goods produced in that county. They
were to stamp their seal of approval only on items that met quality
standards in the “true intent and meaning of this act,” and to
confiscate all wares that were “insufficiently tann’d, curryed, or
wrought.”
Perhaps even more interesting than these regulations are the reasons
given for enacting them: “Forasmuch as divers and sundry deceits and
abuses have been hitherto committed, and daily are committed and
practiced by the Tanners, curriers, and workers of leather in ...
Virginia, to the great injury and damage of the inhabitants ...; And
forasmuch as no leather can be so well tann’d but it may be marred and
spoyled in the currying ...; and forasmuch as leather well tann’d and
curryed may by the negligence, deceit or evill workmanship of the
cordwainer or shoemaker be used deceitfully to the hurt of the occupier
or wearer thereof.”
These phrases (and similar phrases in other laws both colonial and
English) make evident that shoddy materials and slipshod workmanship
issued from the shop of many a craftsman of the eighteenth century. A
recognition of this will help balance the romantic tendency to see every
old-time craftsman as a humble artistic genius with impeccably high
standards of workmanship.
_THE DIFFICULTY OF MAKING A LIVING_
For all its great length and detail, the act of 1691 seems not to have
had much effect. Governor Edmund Andros in 1697 asserted, “There are no
manufactures setled in Virginia Except Inconsiderable tanning and
shoemaking (bad Leather).” And in 1705 Robert Beverley wrote of the
Virginians:
They have their Cloathing of all sorts from _England_, as Linnen,
Woollen, Silk, Hats, and Leather.... The very Furrs that their Hats
are made of, perhaps go first from thence; and most of their Hides lie
and rot, or are made use of, only for covering dry Goods, in a leaky
House. Indeed some few Hides with much Adoe are tann’d, and made into
Servents Shoes; but at so careless a rate, that the Planters don’t
care to buy them, if they can get others, and sometimes perhaps a
better manager than ordinary will vouchsafe to make a pair of Breeches
of a Deer-Skin.
Nearly a half-century later, as Williamsburg’s era of greatest affluence
began, a merchant of Louisa County, Francis Jerdone by name, lamented
that “the Virginians have most of their shoemakers in their own
families, and have no occasion for any but stuff [i.e., cloth] shoes
from Britain.” He referred to members of the well-to-do planter class,
who customarily maintained on their plantations one or more skilled
workmen. Among these there was almost sure to be included a cordwainer
to make and repair the footwear of the plantation “family,” a term that
included the slaves. The shoemaker might be a slave himself, or an
indentured servant, or a journeyman receiving wages.
However, Francis Jerdone could just as well have been writing of another
kind of Virginia planter, the small farmer who built his own house and
barns, made his own crude furniture, coopered his own hogsheads, ground
his own corn, sheared his own sheep, and made the family’s shoes while
his wife spun and wove their clothing. These small farmers, far
outnumbering the great planters, would not have ordered cloth shoes from
London, to be sure. But neither would they have ordered very many
leather ones, either from England or from Williamsburg shoemakers.
Documentary records—fairly full in a few cases, fleeting in most—name 24
men who worked in leather in Williamsburg during the eighteenth century.
The ghostly existence of others can be discerned in references to
unnamed indentured servants, journeymen, slaves, and a few apprentices
who were leatherworkers. Among Williamsburg slaves having some craft
skills, the second greatest number were shoemakers, the greatest number
being carpenters.
A few of these Williamsburg leatherworkers seem to have done fairly well
at their trade. Most of the others probably had little success and moved
elsewhere or into farming; at any rate they left no trace of a
continuing career.
[Illustration: _The conjectural drawing at the right shows how
pieces of metal, wood, and cloth found in 1961 at the bottom of an
eighteenth-century well in Williamsburg could have formed parts of a
lady’s sidesaddle of that day. To the left, partially completed, is
such a saddle copied by today’s master saddler in Williamsburg from
surviving examples._]
_THE ROBERT GILBERT STORY_
Eleven advertisements placed in Williamsburg’s weekly newspaper, the
_Virginia Gazette_, from 1768 to 1783, remain the sole evidence of the
business venture of Robert Gilbert, boot and shoemaker. The story they
tell reveals the hazards faced by most craftsmen in eighteenth-century
Williamsburg: debts piling up, excess stock on hand, shortage of capable
and reliable help, and a market that dried up when the capital moved to
Richmond in 1780.
ROBERT GILBERT, BOOT and SHOEMAKER, &c. HEREBY acquaints the publick
that he has opened shop near the Capitol in _Williamsburg_, where he
intends carrying on his business in all its branches, _viz._ shoe or
channel, calf or buckskin boots, jockey do. and splatterdashes, mens
plain, stitched, spring, and wood-heeled, shoes and pumps, calf or
dogskin; campaign, single, double, or turned channels, slippers, blue
or red turkey, cork soles, galloches; womens leather, stuff, silk, and
braided shoes and pumps, slippers, cork soles, galloches, and clogs.
As he imports the whole of his materials from _Great Britain_, where
punctual payments are required, he proposes supplying Ladies and
Gentlemen with any of the above articles on the most reasonable terms,
for ready money. Those who please to favour him with their custom may
depend on their work being speedily executed, in the genteelest and
newest fashions, and in such a manner as he hopes will merit a
continuance of their favours.
(_Virginia Gazette_, June 30, 1768)
JOURNEYMEN SHOEMAKERS, who are well acquainted with womens or mens
wood heeled work, will meet with good encouragement by applying to the
subscriber in Williamsburg.
ROBERT GILBERT
⁂ He has a large quantity of fine _English_ CALF SKINS on hand, _part_
of which he would dispose of, on very reasonable terms, for ready
money.
(_Virginia Gazette_, May 25, 1769)
WILLIAMSBURG, _Dec._ 6, 1770
I HAVE a parcel of CALF SKINS, and SOLE LEATHER, both back and crop,
which I will sell, for ready money, on reasonable terms.
ROBERT GILBERT
(_Virginia Gazette_, December 13, 1770)
Just IMPORTED from _London_, and to be SOLD by the Subscriber at his
Shop in _Williamsburg_, cheap, for ready Money,
A VARIETY of _Williamson_ and Son’s best SATIN SHOES and PUMPS; white,
blue, and black CALIMANCO SHOES and PUMPS; also CHILDRENS MOROCCO and
CALFSKIN SHOES and PUMPS.
ROBERT GILBERT
(_Virginia Gazette_, May 28, 1772)
A JOURNEYMAN SHOEMAKER, who is sober, and understands making of Boots,
will meet with good Encouragement by applying to me, in
_Williamsburg_.
ROBERT GILBERT
(_Virginia Gazette_, August 13, 1772)