Wisconsin Folklore

43 Meet a Wooden Shoe Hewer

43 Meet a Wooden Shoe Hewer Gladys Fossum Before the mass production of rubber boots and the availability of treated leather, many Wisconsin farmers relied on wooden shoes, as had their old country ancestors, when trodding through barnyard mud, or when milking cows or cleaning the barn. The late Sigvart Terland of Frederic, born in 1907 in the Norwegian village of Helleland, grew up on a farm where he learned to make wooden shoes as his father and grandfather had done. "They'd have long nights in the winter," he told me in 1986, "and I'd sit in the dark and carve." From ages nine to nineteen he made shoes for his parents, two grandparents, himself, and Rve siblings (see also From Hardanger to Harleys: A Survey of Wisconsin Folk Art[Sheboygan, Wisc.: John Michael Kohler Arts Center, 1987], 57, 61,103). Terland continued to make wooden shoes in Wisconsin, as did many others. North Germans, or Plattdeutschers, farming Dodge County bottomlands found wooden shoes as useful as they had been along the Baltic Sea. Near lake Michigan's shore, J. F. Woita of Two Creeks reported that "John last, August Kraase, Fred Messman, and others, who came from Germany, brought with them the art of making Pantoffeln, a kind of wooden slipper. The bottoms were carved out of basswood or pine blocks ... and leather vamps were attached to these bottoms" (Wojta, "Town of Two Creeks, from Forest to Dairy Farms," Wisconsin Magazine of History 1:3 [1944]: 422). Belgians to the north likewise favored a type of wooden clog: When plowing, they wore them without socks, for the sabots soon filled up with loose soil. Being warm and dry they were also worn in winter when logging or working around the sawmills.... In those days there were many wooden shoemakers, and they often produced very artistic sabots beautifully carved and colored. (Hialmer Rued Holand, Wisconsin's Belgian Community [Sturgeon Bay: Door County Historical Society, 1933]. 52-53) Wisconsin's center of wooden shoe production, however, has been in the Sheboygan County communities of Cedar Grove, Gibbsville, and Oostburg, an area settled in the 1840s by the Dutch, or "Hollanders." Traveling through this district a century later, journalist Fred Holmes discovered pairs of wellworn wooden shoes on the back porches of farm homes. Gibbsville's William Ros, described as "the only cobbler of wood left in the community," touted the virtues of wooden shoes over their leather counterparts: "They are Rne to wear while doing chores in winter. If a cow steps on your toe it doesn't hurt. Afterward, when you come in from the barn, it's easy to kick them off and go about the house in stocking feet" (Holmes, Old World Wisconsin: Around Europe in the Badger State [Eau Claire, Wisc.: E. M. Hale, 1944], 121). Fifteen years later Gladys Fossum profiled another "last wooden shoemaker," William Klompenhauwer , proprietor of Oostburg's "Klomp Shop." By the time Klompenhauwer put away his tools in the mid-1960s, nearby Cedar Grove had established its annual "Holland Days" celebration, featuring the youthful "Klompen Dancers" who continue to perform street dances in wooden shoes. In Klompenhauwer's absence the community 432 FOSSUM: Meet a Wooden Shoe Hewer 43.1. William Klompenhauwer works on a wooden shoe in his Oostburg shop, 1950s. Cedarburg Cultural Center. imported Fred Oldemulders, a wooden shoemaker from Holland, Michigan. And by the mid1970s , Bob "Sieg" Siegel, a retired insurance agent and woodworker from Mequon, had succeeded Oldemulders as southeastern Wisconsin's "last wooden shoemaker." (See Passed to the Present: Folk Arts Along Wisconsin's Ethnic Settlement Trail, ed. Robert T. Teske [Cedarburg, Wise.: Cedarburg Cultural Center, 1994], 44-45; and Anne Siegel, "Klompen: Shoes from Trees," Fine Woodworking ISeptember/October 1985]: 55-57.) Gladys Fossum's article below, from the Wisconsin Agriculturolist, is representative of many informative features journalists have published on Wisconsin's practitioners of folk cultural traditions . The defunct Ocooch Mountain News and a pair of current periodicals-the Eau Clairebased farm newspaper, The Country Today, and Madison's tourist-oriented Wisconsin Trails-are consistenrly rewarding sources. So are local newspapers. Since the early 1970s I have kept a clipping Rle from the Rice Lake Chronotype that bulges with accounts and photographs of carvers of miniature farms and lumber camps, farm sign painters, gunsmiths, pack-basket makers, quilters, and rag rug weavers. Journalist Gladys Fossum was raised on a North Dakota farm prior to attending North Dakota Agricultural College, and the Pratt Institute...