The Shoemaker of Pottsville

Katherina Selgrath of Pottsville, Pennsylvania, married a shoemaker when she was not quite 18 years old, in about 1839.

Ferdinand Bödefeld had come from the farming and mining regions of Westphalia, and specifically a village located southwest of Arnsberg called Stockum and sometimes known as Stockum-bei-Amecke (Amecke being the town just at the southern tip of the modern reservoir called Sorpesee). At the end of the 18th century the land belonged to the Duchy of Westphalia, under the control of the Archbishops of Köln until the end of the Holy Roman Empire. After the Thirty Years’ War, the French had annexed much of the land west of the Rhine River, and in 1803 the area was secularized and given to Prussia by the Congress of Vienna.

Ferdinand was the son of Maria Theresia Gierse and Frans Bödefeld. Frans was the son of Josef Bödefeld and Anna Clara Sebastian. Theresia was the daughter of Engelbert Gierse and Anna Catharina Scharfenberger, whose parents were Caspar Scharfenberger and Maria Veronica.

Ferdinand and his younger brother Bernard immigrated to the United States, ending up in Pottsville, Pennsylvania, in the 1830s. Ferdinand established his shoemaker shop there, and among his apprentice shoemakers were his young brother-in-law John Selgrath, and his son Jacob. Ferdinand and Katharina had ten children who lived to adulthood: Jacob, John, Joseph, Magdalena Helena, Katherine, Theresa Agnes, Ferdinand Joseph, Isabella Josephine, Mary Ann, and Francis John (known as Frank).

When the U.S. Civil War began, at first it must have seemed a little remote from the Boedefelds. But soon it became their war too. Their sons John and Joseph joined the Union Army and fought for months through the cold and heat and the mud and terrors. John was wounded, and Joseph severely so. They survived, but life was never the same for them. The same thing happened to John Selgrath, who returned unable to continue with shoemaking as a profession. In the summer of 1863 in particular, the battles moved to Pennsylvania itself as General Robert E. Lee tried to consolidate his forces at Gettysburg. On June 30 part of his army was critically delayed at Hanover and prevented from helping at Gettysburg over the next two days. The Battle of Gettysburg is well documented as a major turning point in the war, and although it was fought over 70 miles away from Pottsville, all the citizens of the area were certainly riveted by what happened there. We do not know what Ferdinand Boedefeld did in particular to help the Union in the War, besides sending his sons to fight, but two years after the war ended he was presented with an inscribed gold-headed cane that said,

“To Ferdinand Bodefeld by his Friends, as a mark of esteem for his devotion to his adopted Country, in the hour of her peril. July 1867.”

Shoe making in the early part of the nineteenth century was still an ages-old handcraft, able to be done by a single person. Towards the middle of the century after the invention of the sewing machine by Elias Howe in 1846, somebody else invented a machine for stitching parts of shoes. Thereafter, the mechanization of making shoes progressed through the century until most shoes were being made in factories using machines by 1900. But Ferdinand Boedefeld made shoes and boots by hand until he could no longer work. He handed over his business to his son Jacob, and Jacob became a well-known boot-and-shoe maker in Pottsville, listed in bold letters in all the city directories until 1895, when he died suddenly, only nine years after his father, Ferdinand.

For many years the boot-and-shoe making tools were around our house, but sometime in the last 35 years they disappeared.

Sic transit gloria mundi . . . et calceamenta!