If the Shoe Doesn't Fit...

The General, always fastidious with details, wanted to ensure that his overseas shoe purchases would be fulfilled to his expectations. In many of his instructions to his agent, Washington noted the specific size of his wife's shoes - the “smallest fives”[3] or “large fours”[4]. According to the calculations of modern experts, this means that five-feet-tall Martha Washington would have been a contemporary shoe size 7.

However, making sizing requests would sometimes be of little benefit. On a 1761 order for Martha’s shoes, Washington noted that “those sent last year were too narrow over the instep and rather too short”[5]. In another instance he recommended that the shoemaker alter the fit to be “broader in the soles and not so straight over the toes as they were last year.”[6]

And if there would be any question as to the size of his wife’s foot, the General sent one of Martha's cast-off shoes to the shoemaker in London to ensure that new shoes would “…be made by the shoe sent (having Martha Washington wrote therein) by Gresham at the Crown in Covent Garden who is desired to keep the shoe by him to save the trouble of sending a measure every year.”[7]

As modern shoe shoppers know, sometimes a purchase just doesn't work out. On March 15, 1789, George Washington again wrote to his broker: “Mrs. Washington’s slippers and clogs have come safe to hand, the latter, however, are not as she wished to have… and will, by the first convenient opportunity, return the clogs to Mr. Palmer and get a pair of galoshes.” Thomas Palmer, a shoemaker whose shop was at 74 Chestnut Street in the main shopping district of Philadelphia, [8] probably re-sold Mrs. Washington’s returned custom pair to a middle-class shopper.