These shoes were passed down through six generations of an Illinois family. They were worn by the donor’s great-great-grandmother, Joahanna Herrick of Massachusetts, when she married William Bartlett at age 16 in 1761. The shoes were made by a travelling shoemaker, who used a piece of Johanna’s green and white brocade wedding gown.

Over the course of three generations, Johanna’s descendants migrated from Massachusetts to Pennsylvania to Kentucky to Illinois, where her grandson William Brown settled in 1834.