LOOKING BACK is a Leader online feature that highlights historic photos. Readers are invited to submit their historic Jefferson County photos for online publication.
Back when the Baltimore Orioles were the loveable but hapless St. Louis Browns, there was a saying about St. Louis: "First in shoes, first in booze and last in the American League."
Back then, in Jefferson County at least, De Soto was first in shoes (as well as in railroads and artesian wells, but that's not quite so lyrical).
De Soto's footwear history was intertwined with St. Louis. A St. Louis resident, Eddie Miller, chose the Fountain City as the site of a factory for his Peters Shoe Co.
The factory, 201 E. Clement St. at Factory Street, was built in 1907 on the banks of the Joachim Creek in a small park area known as Idlers' Nook.
While the factory was being constructed, Miller transferred workers from St. Louis to temporary headquarters on South Main Street to train locals in the craft of shoemaking.
By the fall of 1908, the factory was fully operational, with more than 200 De Soto residents on the payroll. And speaking of payroll: The employees worked 59-hour weeks for a $2.40 salary.
In 1911, Peters Shoe Co. merged with Roberts, Johnson and Rand to form the International Shoe Co., which also had a huge facility in south St. Louis. The De Soto facility was led by a young E.S. Fauth Sr.
While the boom that followed World War II expanded the U.S. economy, the shoe industry didn't follow suit. The factory eventually shuttered in April 1958.
City leaders scrambled to fill the void and by the next year had lured Hamilton Shoe Co. of St. Louis to open a factory in the same building with around 300 workers.
However, in the early 1980s, that company decided it needed a new building, and a single-story facility was built at highways E and V to build Hamilton's Penaljo shoes.
By the late 1980s, however, the factory closed and De Soto was out of the shoe business. The former Penaljo site now is the home of ABZ Inc., which makes plastics and resins.
Back at East Clement and Factory streets, a few occupants have come and gone through the years after Hamilton moved, but it's long been vacant, standing as a memory of a once-vibrant industry.
PHOTO: The shoe factory at East Clement and Factory streets.
Send submissions to LOOKING BACK to nvrweakly@aol.com or bring or mail them to the Leader office, 503 N. Second St., Festus (P.O. Box 159, 63028). Please include your name, phone number, a brief description of what's in the photo and tell us how you came by it. Please also include when it was taken, where and by whom (if known). A new LOOKING BACK photo will be posted each week.
- Steve Taylor
