Fashionable and Work Shoes from a Nineteenth-Century Boston Privy

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.