_Thanks to Pioneering Here,
Millions of American Soldiers
Wear Good Shoes_
Quiet little Brewster, Cape Cod, offers a rich tapestry of Americana.
Many a U. S. soldier slogging over the world battlefronts is wearing
brogans turned out by patented machines of the great United Shoe
Machinery--which started from a one-man cobbling business in oldtime
Brewster.
West Brewster, dubbed “Factory Village” by the old timers, was a
bustling scene, with spinning, fulling and grist mills, tannery and
iron works, and the still-present Flax Pond, where flax gathered in
surrounding fields was put to soak in the water-retting process of
making linen.
The sheep growers would trek here, over the fields and ragged roads,
with their bags of wool. The going was hard on their footwear, it was
noted by the Winslow brothers, one of whom operated a fulling mill
and the other, a grist mill. So, to maintain good will, the fulling
mill Winslow verged into a sideline of cobbling the shoes of his wool
producers.
But, a teen-age son--who gave the lie to common gossip of that day,
that the younger generation was swiftly going to the dogs--was actually
the one who transformed the humble cobbler’s tapping into a nationwide
whirr and, incidentally, founded the Great Winslow fortune of today.