Bangor led in production of moccasins

When 20 moccasin sewers at the Sawyer Boot and Shoe Co. went on strike a century ago, it was important news to Bangoreans. Having lost their title as the lumber capital of the world some decades before, they still had bragging rights to being the moccasin capital of the nation. They didn’t want to lose that.

The jobs at Sawyer’s must have been good ones, because management had no trouble replacing a dozen of the workers almost immediately. Then they went to Boston to replace the rest with “Italian harness sewers,” said the Bangor Daily Commercial on Oct. 8 and 9, 1907. No mention was made whether they tried to recruit Indian Island residents, whose forebears had invented the famous product.

The dispute between Sawyer and the union remained unsettled at the end of the year, according to Maine’s Bureau of Industrial and Labor Statistics. But it didn’t slow business, we are told. Moccasins from Sawyer and the city’s other manufacturers were still being shipped all over North America.

“The temporary setback that was given by the strike has not had a lasting effect and all factories are running full blast,” reported the Bangor Daily News on Nov. 14. The event prompted the newspaper to offer its readers a brief history of the city’s moccasin industry, which I have supplemented with information from other sources including James Vickery’s essay “Made in Bangor: Economic Emergence and Adaptation, 1834-1911,” written for the Bangor Historical Society.

“The industry dates from 1851 when E.P. Baldwin of Bangor, who kept a shoe store on the Kenduskeag Bridge, obtained some leather, prepared in a special way, from Davis & Co. of Pawtucket, R.I., where most of the tanning was done at that time, and began the manufacture of moccasins,” said the BDN. The next year others took up the trade. By 1868, four firms were actively engaged: Thomas Hersey, J.O.B. Darling, William Margesson and E.A. Buck & Co.

New machinery revolutionized production. Buck, formerly employed by Darling, was the first in the nation to mass-produce moccasins, according to Vickery. His 40 employees manufactured 65,000 pairs a year. Buck obtained a patent for a riveted seam that avoided tearing. Only about an eighth of his trade was local. It was reported in 1884 that Bangor produced more moccasins than all other states combined.

Moving ahead to 1907, a century ago, there were several moccasin manufacturers listed in the Bangor City Directory besides Sawyer. They included John T. Clark & Co., J.L. Coombs and the Bangor Moccasin Co. Old-timer E.A. Buck was still in business as well. These firms employed more than 100 people. The Bangor Shoe Co., which employed 150 people, may have been producing some moccasins as well. The Queen City’s thriving boot and shoe industry had existed since the Civil War.

Not all the moccasin work was conducted in the factories. Some of the stitching was farmed out. “Much of the sewing is still done by hand, being let out by the piece to Canadian families, many of whom live at a place called ‘The Red Bridge’ a mile or two up the river from Bangor post office,” said the Bangor Daily News. Red Bridge was where Penjajawoc Stream entered the Penobscot River.

There were dozens of styles, ranging from high, lace-up boots and shoes to “dainty slippers.” They were shipped all over the world. “The other day I saw an order for these dainty slippers all the way from Japan. A good many common moccasins are sent to the Klondike and all along the northern Pacific coast of the United States,” said the Bangor Daily reporter.

The next year, 1908, E.A. Buck, industry pioneer, died. He had produced the “wigwam” and “elk” slippers and other favorites. (Perhaps he was equally famous around Bangor for having been employed in his youth as a printer by Marcellus Emery, whose Copperhead press was destroyed by a pro-war mob in downtown Bangor at the beginning of the Civil War.)

Fifteen years later, Sawyer Boot and Shoe Co. appeared to have emerged as the champion in the race to produce Bangor moccasins. Sawyer occupied the Adams Building on Columbia Street and maintained a tannery in Newport.

“The company is rated as the largest, oldest and best known manufacturer of moccasins in the world,” boasted a promotional piece in the BDN on Dec. 12, 1923. Having started producing moccasins 25 years earlier with three workers, Sawyer now employed 125 to 150 men and women. “You don’t know how to walk until you have tried the Moc,” was a favored slogan.

The company made 200 varieties including Moc-Shus, Hiawatha Slippers, Barefoot and moccasin ski boots, according to the Commercial on June 30. “So perfect are the reproductions of old Indian symbols and tribal designs on these slippers that the wiser Indians often canoe up and down the streams, selling Sawyer moccasins as their own to summer tourists,” claimed a company brochure.

How many Penobscots actually sold manufactured moccasins from their canoes is a question for conjecture. Today, however, some of those old Bangor-made moccasins no doubt are tucked away in the backs of closets and attics waiting to be displayed to the public at the Bangor Historical Society.

Wayne E. Reilly can be reached at wreilly@bangordailynews.net Dick Shaw contributed information to this column.