EARLY 1900'S ANKLE BOOTS

A rare color for this pair of BROWN BLUE RIBBON elkskin shoes ......

Beautiful finish for a factory made pair of boots a quick estimate places them around 1913 /1920 nicely detailed branding on the sole....

7 1/5 D dead stock pair of BLUE RIBBON their soft elk leather makes them fit like a glove.......

Straight from the archives, the first trace i was able to find , of this unusual shoe called: ELKSKIN. as advertised in a 1913 mail order catalog from Chicago.....

Another example in a 1917 Montgomery Ward catalog...

1926...same design but bulkier . little more popular perhaps !?....

1934 MW catalog....still advertised as comfort work shoes ....

Another unusual find today ,a little more "of the wall" than your average work boots from the same era....I must admit that at first ,i was a little reluctant to get them,as i thought they were more sports, than work related....silly me right !?perhaps because they were unlined and less rugged than expected for a work shoe. Then while talking to the vendor i suddenly remembered seing something similar ,in one of my earliest mail order catalog and decided to take the risk ,if any.....Well!!! lucky me,i was right .So here they're for you guys to enjoy too, a nice dead stock pair of BLUE RIBBON BROWN'S ELKSIN WORK SHOES from the early 1900's....

here's a little blab about the company's history......

In 1878 George Warren Brown, Alvin L. Bryan, and Jerome Desnoyers founded a women's shoes manufacturing company called Bryan, Brown and Company. Desnoyers retired in 1893, and the company's name was changed to Brown Shoe Company.

By 1900, the St Louis based company, had sales reaching $4 million. At that time John Bush, a Brown Shoe executive, acquired the rights to the "Buster Brown" cartoon character. This character would remain the company's signature logo for decades. The company's early marketing gimmick involved a traveling show of performers dressed as Buster Brown, the company's mascot, who put on shows in theaters, shoe stores, and department stores. Brown Shoe pioneered the idea of marketing specific shoe brands to retailers, rather than the traditional method of traveling store-to-store with samples of every shoe manufactured by the company.

Brown Shoe Company's run-ins with unions began in 1907 when the company opened its first plant outside of St. Louis in response to increased union activity in its existing urban plants. For twenty years following this, the company pursued a policy of opening factories in rural areas, where there was little to no union activity but mostly to cut the production costs . Brown Shoe began hiring women and children in 1911, as labor costs were increasing and it was legal to pay women and children less than men. More than half of the shoe workers in St. Louis were between the ages of fourteen and nineteen .Ironically, most of them,could not afford a pair of the shoes they were making .During the Depression in the 1930s, the company lowered its costs again by lowering the wages it paid to its workers.Same old story right !??......

The company was incorporated in New York in 1913, and went public on the New York Stock Exchange that same year. World War I brought a business boom to the company, as it won contracts to supply shoes to the U.S. troops. The company's second brand of shoes, Naturalizer, was introduced in 1927. Other Brown Shoe brands included Buster Brown, Brownbilt, Tread Straight, and the brand featured on today's post.....Blue Ribbon