Excerpt from Shoe Making: Old and New In the manufacture of boots and shoes the United States is the fore most nation in the world today. The industry of making boots and shoes is among the most important industries of the nation today and it is also among the oldest. An ih quiry into the rise of the industry from its humble beginnings of co lonial times to its Splendid pros perons, but, very complex state, of today, reveals some interesting changes in commercial and social life, as well as in the mechanics and economics of manufacturing. The first white people in this country of course brought over their boots and shoes from the European mother countries, and they were for a long time depend ent upon the mother countries for additional supplies of footwear. There were, in the first days of the settlements, no big factories, such as there are today, nor even any little shoe shops or ten foot ers, as the shops occupied by the old fashioned hand shoemakers were called. The colonists found only forests and wild lands inbah ited by Indians and animals. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.