Figure 1.--Herevwe see a fashionnly dressed mother and her son who looks to be about 6 years old. He wears a fadionble button-on suit, but is barefoot. The portrait is undated, but looks like the 1870s to us. The studio was Allison in Caswell Country, North Carolina.

Boys continued to commonly go barefoot in Amweica during the 1870s. We have very little indication of this, however, in the mostly studio-based photographic record of the time. Images of barefoot boys in studio portaits are very rare. We have archived thousands of images and have found only a handful of barefoot boys. Mostly boys are wearing long pants with shoes or longish knee pants with long stockings and shoes. Mothers for the most part insisted on dressing up the children in their best clothese for these studio portaits. We have found one portait of of a fashiinable North Carolina lady (figitr 1). This is the only portait we have managed to archive before the 1890s of a barefoot boy with a fashionably dressed mother. Notably it was in the south where for both economic and climatic reasons, going barefoot was esppecially common. Boys in the Deep South could go barefoot nearly year round. In the North this was not possible. The further north you went the more limited was the summer period in which children could go barefoot. Going barefoot was to a degree also afected by urbanization. Urbanization increased significantly in the 1860s andf by 1870 had reached the 25 percent milestone. This increased only slightly during the rest of the decade. We note a few photographic portraits in which boys were barefoot. One example is an unidentified boy, we believe in the 1870s. These portraits are rare and often look to be of boys of modest circumstances or from what look to be low-cost studios. We have begun to collect 1870s school images, but can not yet draw any conclusions.