Civil War Brogans Restoration

[Music] hey welcome back guys today we've got something a little bit different I'm kind of a history nerd and occasionally we get some old old shoes or hold old boots in here we've had some old turn-of-the-century explorer mountain climbing boots that still have the old hot nails and spikes screwed into them and like something out of National Geographic they say we've had some War - double buckle boots we've had some marine Brogan's that when I cracked it open I seriously was expecting to find like sand from Iwo Jima on it was I mean pretty cool but the gentleman who actually brought a man bottoms straight from the guy who warm during the war and I just loved getting old stuff like that kind of really see how shoes were created back then how they've evolved you know what was the point of that type of shoe and today we've actually got a pair of Civil War Brogan's and now these are reproduction because the you know the Civil War hobby and and studying the Civil War is still popular in United States especially down here in the south and so this pair is actually made by a shoemaker named tequila and seen his work before and he does some pretty good stuff soles are actually got pegs in them that's how they're actually held together some of them are stitched these actually have some military military Hill rims owned by some horseshoes but this guy's just blending all the way through and today we're gonna give these some more life so he can get back down there to the national parks or wherever he's gonna go and teach them more history all right so this is the bottom of what most of the shoes look like and like I said earlier these are actually used pegs and they were actually more if you look at what the quartermaster's during the war actually ordered from the makers they actually had more that were stitched then they had the the pegged on both sides the north and the south and one of the reasons why is because these pegs just like on a pair of cowboy boots how you often have pegs coming through the waist if the soul were to get dry the leather will shrink and then the pegs can actually dry out and fall out and if the pegs fall out the whole soul falls off so these are fine as long as you're walking on moist grass or mud or whatnot but you've started to see a lot of these after the war they send them out west see like the cavalry units and they had a law it's very dry out there so they had a lot of issues with the soles falling off it takes a while for these to break in and this is a very very crudely made shoe and I don't say that it's any disrespect to the guy that made it because he made it exactly the way with it they're supposed to be these shoes were made in mass the Civil War was one of the first wars that really started implementing mass production of produced shoes and it wasn't even during the early parts of the war you actually had shoes that were straight there was no right foot left foot the last were straight and you just had to wear them until your feet started to make the shoe conform to you but they did start coming out just prior to the war and during the war with the right foot left foot so the customer wants to actually keep his Hill Ram's and so we're going to take these off and then we'll greet when we redo it and then we'll put these back on they did do actually a lot of half soul replacements during the war there's a buddy of mine who was doing some historical architectural stuff down at the Masonic Lodge and Franklin Tennessee and he was under the crawlspace of the building and this is an old Masonic Lodge it was actually used as a barracks for Union soldiers during the war and he actually found part of her broken underneath there it's pretty much just all deteriorated since he touched it pretty much just crumbled but they give you half souls some of these things so we've got the block off and as you'll notice this is all I've already taken the we called the top lifts off but it was all leather it's just all leather this whole thing is leather these they didn't have concrete back then you need cobblestones is about the worst that you kind of have to worry about but this is mostly made for walking on dirt roads talking on grass but we're gonna go ahead and make some some new blocks out of some send me budget and leather and let's get this soul off now while I'm doing this you gotta remember like I said these things were crudely made and they were made to get a soldier as far as you could but when your soldier and you're marching you know hundreds and hundreds of miles some of them thousands of miles you're gonna burn through these things and if the supply trains weren't able to keep up with the army or then you had to kind of make do so there's stories of at least one on the Confederate side where they had to pull former shoemakers and cobblers that were actually in the army they had to pull them out of the rank and they were repairing shoes and making shoes right on the side of the road to try to keep the soldiers from going barefoot you know a lot of them did go barefoot and out comes the pegs I'm actually going to keep this because I want to know what the distance is for the pegs because a lot of the guys that make these reproduction boots are making these off of originals and they pull their stitch width uppers and all the details they pull from originals and we want to keep it as historically accurate as we can so I'll try to get back to this alright so this is a this can be a very simple result on the simple feet and just to kind of keep with the authenticity of the air we're just gonna use our house leather which you know just a simple simple leather and most of the time this is gonna be worn on grass and so there's no real need to go with a high-end quality leather let's put these on [Music] [Music] [Music] all right yes so we have put the new soul zone and I'm gonna make some new blocks out of these and I'm gonna tender it the old-fashioned way I'm gonna make my own we've got a bunch of scrap leather from a soul bin that we like to use a lot of times as you get up towards the mid-back on the on the soul man it starts to get a little looser than further down on the rear and so we'd like to use those for making blocks and I've just made a couple of patterns of the original block and then we'll just cut these out and keep going I'm actually doing it the slow way they actually have tools that do this that look like a big spur and a boot spur on a will and you just roll along and it pokes all these but I don't have one so I get two and don't quote me on this but I know they had developed pegging machines that would automatically do this and I can't remember exactly when those came about and may have been 20th century but this is a more labor-intensive these are limited wood pegs and I like to just dip a little bit into glue usually helps them to go in a little easier but also then just help them to plot just a little bit more and we don't want them going all the way in we're actually gonna have to clip these off and then sand them down but I've set my awl to the exact distance that it needs to the depth that needs to go in [Music] so it's actually the next day and we're gonna finish up this pair of old Brogan's we have get the souls all pegged um and attached we're gonna put the hill blocks on one of the things that we have at our disposal today that they didn't have back in is a lot stronger glue so yeah some kind of view course by using some obviously some modern technology but one of the last so let's put the hill blocks out all right so I've made these two blocks they're very crude but they are the height that it needs to be like the original and instead of using threaded nails like we normally would in most shoemakers use we're gonna use a squared off iron nails that would have been used at that time so I'm gonna go ahead and clean up the excess that we know exactly where the edge is so I can put all my nails around so these are the old they almost look like old square cut nails that you would see in the eighteen hundred's that people built houses with but they're just a lot thinner and these will actually go all the way through the block and until it hits the goes through the insole and the foot bed and then right when you see it start to kind of band and Carl you know you've you've sunk them as deep as they're going to go so we've reached the jack not going out a little bit of an angle there's a little bit more correct this will be the top lift when we mostly have rubber I didn't have it well actually they did but not on shoes like this so we're gonna put this and this will cover up those nails and then we'll put his Hill plates back on this so I'm actually going to flip these around this was actually on the other shoe and you can see where he's worn it on this side but it's kind of turning your rotors I'll give him a little bit more life on his hope lights over on this side you know again he wanted to reuse these tights normally we put a burnishing ink on here this actually gets some waxes in it but these shoes were not meant to shine on the side and have a high gloss obviously the dye recipes have changed over the century but just a simple alcohol dye is gonna be the closest we can get to it so we put the help lights on and these things get abused I mean they're out in the elements in the wet grass and in the mud and all that so we're just gonna give the uppers little treatment with some of the Everest you might be able to see from here but the when I die these they're not pitch black and a lot of the older dies back then had almost an opaque tint to them they weren't you had to go over multiple multiple times before he wanted to get them like real dark so that's thing adds came in to the authentic look to him this one's traded and these things are basically done all I'm gonna do now is actually just spray the bottoms of the soles with water just to let that soak in and let all these wood pegs expand and just really grip bone all right yeah so we finished up this pair of old Civil War programs oh I'm reproduction old Civil War Brogan's now just a reminder that this was not to be 100% authentic to history we tried to use what we could obviously we got modern glows modern machinery and this was not a complete history lesson for the shoes it was just to give you an idea of kind of the evolution of shoes military shoes and just something a little different have some fun with it so I don't want to get hammered by ball the other historians out that I'm a history guy myself but like I said this was not - you know every little detail I said it's not the gospel cost there's so many variations out there with military boots but thanks for watching this if you liked it hit our subscribe button we'll probably have some more military shoes coming through here soon and hit the little bell a little reminder because we'll have more of these coming at you have a good [Music] you [Music]

Channel: Trenton & Heath

Views: 479,874

Keywords: #civilwar, #civilwarbrogans, #brogans, #historybuff, #restoration, #bootrestoration, #civilwarbuff, #civilwarsoldierclothing, #americancivilwar, #civilwarreenactment, #bootresole, #americanhistory, #shoecobbler, #shoerepair

Id: LTevsaDyndc

Length: 17min 27sec (1047 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 20 2019