Chippewa

Chippewa Boots was founded in 1901 in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, originally as the Chippewa Shoe Manufacturing Company, taking its name from the Ojibwe (Chippewa) people native to the region where the company began. The company's earliest factory, on River Street, employed around 175 workers, most of them women, producing about 1,200 pairs of boots a day; by 1910 daily output had grown to more than 2,500 pairs. Wisconsin and Minnesota's economies at the time were heavily built on logging, paper and pulp industries, all of which demanded footwear able to withstand wet, cold and physically punishing working conditions, and Chippewa built its early business supplying that market. During the First World War, Chippewa supplied boots to Allied forces in Europe before the US formally entered the war on April 6, 1917, and continued supplying US military footwear after that. The company was also the first American bootmaker to produce boots using Vibram soles imported from Italy, adopting a sole technology that would go on to become standard across much of the outdoor and work-boot industry. More than a century after its founding, Chippewa remains a recognized name in American logger and engineer-style work boots, still associated with the Wisconsin industrial and logging heritage the brand was originally built to serve.