By Peggy Derrick, Curator
The shoes and I ....
This semester we have a record number of interns and volunteers working in collections, so I decided to do a focused survey of our shoe collection, with the goal of getting all of them identified, catalogued, photographed and properly stored. We opened up the stacks of old shoe boxes stashed in the bottom of closets, and spread them out.
How many shoes does the museum have, after all? More important, how many does it need? How many shoes do you have in your closet? We had…192 pairs of shoes! We will be making recommendations for items to be deaccessioned, or removed from the collection. When this project is over, the LCHS shoe collection will be much smaller, as well as organized and documented. It will be an awesome collection, with excellent examples of design and fashion from the early days of La Crosse, up to the end of the Twentieth Century.
We are calling our shoe project “History from the Ankle Down,” and over the next few weeks you can follow along as we write descriptions, and learn about shoe design and the history of footwear.
Introducing the bloggers:
Amanda Drummond: UW-La Crosse, class of 2013, History major & minor in Public History
Danielle Kresbach: UW-La Crosse, class of 2013, Archaeology major
Dakota Elliott: UW-La Crosse, class of 2015, History major, & minor in Archaeology
Carmen Robieson: Viterbo University, class of 2014, History major
Jamie Wilcenski: UW-La Crosse, class of 2014, Sociology major & minor in Anthropology
Sarah Stepanik: UW-La Crosse, class of 2015, Archaeology major, & minors in Anthropology and Biology
Erika Fortlage: UW-La Crosse, class of 2015, Archaeology major & minor in Anthropology
