Dear Gary,
I greatly enjoyed reading your posting on pegs, and hope you might send me a copy of the 'Tool Shed' article you mentioned and the PNTCA newsletter? It's refreshing that other researchers are digging into pegs--a small but fascinating facet of the historical shoe trade.
In reply to your posting, the "old man" didn't mention what his shoe pegs were used for at all, but at that date heels would be a safer bet than soles, although pegged soles on new-made work (i.e. pegged-shoes), rather than just repair soles, are not far off.
I'm curious about the evidence for your 1650 date for English heel-pegs being 1/8", square-section? I assume you mean 1/8" in cross-section, not length, right? Having examined a lot of English, American, and European footwear from c.1600 onwards. Roughly speaking, heel-pegs can be broken down into two categories:
1) Whittled: The irregular or oval whittled ones are the earliest, and appear to have been made from a long sliver of suitable sized split wood. The taper and point are whittled, the peg snipped off to length, then the next taper and point whittled, snipped off, etc., etc., no file, just a sharp knife. I've made them this way, and it's very quick and easy, and for handling, a long bit of wood stock works easier than having to handle little stubby pieces. I recall I started with a 3' length. The result is an irregular or oval cross-section peg, anywhere from 1/8" to 1/4", or even more, across at the wide end. The lengths vary according to the heel. Probably the longest 17thc. and 18thc. heel-pegs I've seen removed from stacked leather heels were 3/4" long. Some of the heel-pegs in early 18thc. jack boots are huge in cross-section. The ones in women's covered wooden heels from the same dates are tiny (+/- 3/32"), to prevent splitting the wood heel--so there was a wide range of sizes depending on the application. The vast majority of heel-pegs (I make this distinction here because, prior to c.1800-1810 there are no sole-pegs per-se).
2) Split: Split pegs, with a square or diamond cross-section, start... I'm thinking without looking at my files, around 1700-1725(?), but don't hold me too it--if it becomes critical I'll look up the exact dates. These were still primarily heel-pegs, and increasingly, now, for slap-dash repair half-soling. Split pegs begin to dominate, and oval whittled pegs begin to fade noticeably c.1750-1770. I think the "last" oval whittled heel-pegs I've seen are c.1760s.
Oliver Goldsmith, (in 'Vicar of Wakefield'), and another British author, late 17thc., who's name eludes me at the moment (John Bunyan?), wrote in passing about prison inmates being set to work making wooden pegs for sale to shoemakers and other trades, like tobacconists, in the 17thc. and 18thc. Whittled with just a knife? Split with a toothed plane, or other more complex gadgets? I have no idea.
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"I think your suggestion that he was using a modified jack plane to cut the serrated edges is probably correct.
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Glad you agree. My thinking there was, whatever unique technique he used, he implies he can make more pegs, faster and cheaper, than whatever technique shoemakers commonly employed themselves. And since I have seen no evidence shoemakers commonly owned or had these toothed jack planes, it seemed a plausible theory.
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"Last year I met a man who claims to have made shoe pegs with a file and a jack knife during the Great Depression of the 1930s to help his dad repair family shoes when money was tight."
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How did he describe the use of the file exactly? To nick the end-grain of a block of wood into rows for splitting pegs off with the knife? Tell us more.
I think you're right-on on the changes in the New England peg-shoe market, etc. The earliest archaeological/historical examples of pegged shoes I've recorded (Harford Iron Furnace, MD 1820s, and John Quincy Adams Birthplace c.1820-30) show a variety of inconsistent peg sizes for men's, women's and children's. Another feature you didn't mention here, is the relationship between the pegs and the pegging awl blades--the latter come in certain sizes. IOW "Size Matters". The thickness of the pegs must be larger by a certain amount than the hole the awl makes for the pegging to hold effectively. Length can be variable by bushing the blade with bits of leather to shorten its effective length and depth of hole. Another feature might have been, too, with one or more of the early pegging "machines" being 2-stroke, hand-held, hopper-feed (loose pegs), hammer-actuated gadgets (e.g. 1849 patent gadget in Sackett & Wilhelms 1880? litho. NY), to work at all the pegs now needed to be very uniform and consistent to feed properly--more perfectly shaped and sized than for hand-pegging IOW. Did your research turn up anything on these "machines"?
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OBITUARY "OBUVIARY" NOTICE:
Regrettably the good "Dr. Obuv" was taken ill over the Winter, and passed away to shoe-research heaven. Services were short, bagpipes played, and whiskey was drunk as he wished. He bequeathed me all of his files, library, and though a Vulcan Mind-Meld on his sick-bed, has deposited all of his knowledge into my head. God rest his soul
Yes...okay, okay, it's been me all along.
In the "ancient days" of this Forum, DW and I felt we needed to prime the pump so to speak for participants--what few there were in the beginning--and one of my solutions was to create "Dr. Obuv" [Obuv is Czech for shoe, I'd just returned from a shoe-conference in CZ, and a few colleagues were teasing me, calling me "Dr. Shoe", so it seemed apropos]. This way I could converse with "Dr.", etc., and it gave us another interesting character to play off of--not that I'm not an interesting character on my own but... Anyway, there it is, out in the open.