Fashionable and Work Shoes from a Nineteenth-Century Boston Privy

Abstract

In 1993 excavation of a privy at 27/29 Endicott Street in Boston, Massachusetts, yielded fragments of fashionable and work shoes dating from the 1850s to the 1880s. During these years, two household types lived at the house: all females, some of whom may have been prostitutes, from the 1850s to 1867; and a doctor and his family from 1867 to the 1880s. Three shoe features provide clues about shoe construction and the wearers’ class, gender, and occupation: (1) construction methods, apparent in the soles; (2) style, most evident in shoe uppers; and (3) size. Artifacts provide new evidence of a rand, a shoe part found in the sole.

Excavations of a 19th-century Boston privy and cistern yielded a wide variety of artifacts including glass, ceramics, buttons, leather, textiles, and food remains; the research focused on the leather artifacts, identifi able mostly as shoe fragments, and the occupants of two houses associated with the privy. Over a 30-year period, two different types of households lived at 27/29 Endicott Street. Differences in the leather artifact patterns for each household, based on the construction, style, and sizing of the shoes, provide inferences about the class, gender, and occupation of the occupants. Other archaeological fi nds provide comparative material in relation to prostitution, female boarding houses, shoe styles, and shoe construction (Anderson 1968; Huddleson and Watanabe 1990; Seifert 1991, 1994; Costello et al. 1998). The Endicott Street site artifacts also contain new evidence of a type of rand used in place of a midsole.