Amy Vach

Catalog Number: 2020.001.01

A few short years before the La Crosse Rubber Mills opened, the city was home to another shoe manufacturing factory in the late nineteenth century, the La Crosse Boot and Shoe Manufacturing Company.

With a capital of $50,000, the company began in 1892 at 115 N. Second St.

This pair of children’s shoes were manufactured in the late 1890s by the La Crosse Boot and Shoe Manufacturing Company. Emma Karlsbraaten (later Housker), a resident of Houston County, wore these shoes as a child.

These canvas shoes have seven white, enamel-covered buttons, and leather soles. The shoes are stained and worn, but the soles still bear the manufacturer’s engraved mark in cursive: “La Crosse B & S Mfg Co.”

In 1897, the La Crosse Boot and Shoe Manufacturing Company and 176 workmen from La Crosse brought forth a petition to the Wisconsin Legislature, “praying for the passage of a law to relieve them from the unjust and unequal competition with prison labor.”

At the time, certain companies paid Wisconsin and other states to produce shoes with inexpensive prison labor. However, La Crosse Boot and Shoe Manufacturing Company’s petition had no effect on the prison labor system.

In a 1921 issue of Boot and Shoe Recorder, a national magazine for the footwear trade, the La Crosse Boot and Shoe Manufacturing Company placed quite a few advertisements with pictures and such catchy marketing as:

“La Crosse buyers return season after season. Sell a pair of La Crosse shoes to a customer, and he sticks to you.”
“Don’t get ‘off on the wrong foot’ by selling showy shoes to your trade at a sacrifice of wearing value.”
“Sell your customers low shoe cost per mile.”

Unfortunately, after roughly 40 years in business, the factory closed in the mid- to late 1920s. After the company’s closure, La Crosse Garment Company purchased the building and retrofitted it with new state-of-the-art machinery and safety features.

This article was originally published in the La Crosse Tribune on July 11, 2020.

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