Robert Mullen
Catalog Number: 1931.008.01
This black leather shoe really isn’t much to look at.
It is scuffed and worn and only has traces of its shoelaces remaining. It’s just a shoe, and it is very old. It’s been through the mill and might easily have been tossed out a hundred years ago.
But this lone shoe has a story to tell — in fact, a pair of stories. The shoe illuminates the lives of two local immigrants who lived most of their lives in the Onalaska area, Tobias Nelson and Theodore Comeau.
Tobias Nelson was born in Norway in 1847 and came to this country in 1868. He married Nettie Swinson, the daughter of Norwegian immigrants, in 1875. They had nine children.
Nelson must have trained in the craft of shoemaking in Norway, for he practiced that trade here, first in La Crosse, then in Onalaska after his marriage.
Tobias made shoes by hand during a time when shoes were made in factories. On the East Coast, Chicago and St. Louis, factory-made shoes and boots were rapidly replacing those made by hand. While Nelson may have sold the factory shoes, he also handcrafted custom shoes. He practiced the traditional method of using wooden pegs to hold the layers of the sole together and sewing the upper pieces with waxed linen thread.
Tobias Nelson made this shoe for another immigrant, Canadian Theodore Comeau.
Born in 1838 in Quebec, Comeau arrived in the La Crosse area in 1858, probably to work in the lumber industry. He served in the Union Army during the Civil War and married Isabelle Hutchinson when he returned in 1865. They reared 12 children.
Comeau was listed as a laborer during his working years in Onalaska. He purchased a pair of shoes in 1895 from shoemaker Tobias Nelson to wear in his job on the Black River.
These were not ordinary street shoes. Nelson inserted nine metal spikes on the bottom of the shoes, especially for the Canadian man’s occupation.
The spikes allowed the lumberman Comeau to have the traction and control he needed to stand on a log and tug or heave trees downstream.
Historical Society records indicate that Comeau wore these shoes to break up log jams in the river. This remaining shoe saw some heavy wear and tear in the logging industry. No wonder it looks a bit bedraggled today.
This old shoe brings back to life the stories of two immigrants from two different nations who came to La Crosse County to make better lives for themselves.
From their homelands, each brought the skills and ingenuity they needed to make a living. Both Nelson and Comeau found wives in La Crosse County and had large families, their paths crossing in 1895 when Tobias Nelson crafted this shoe for Theodore Comeau.
That is some shoe.
This article was originally published in the La Crosse Tribune on March 7, 2020.
This object can be viewed in our online collections database by clicking here.
