Hyer Boot Company · History

Why collectors care

Hyer Boot Company is the historic Olathe, Kansas manufacturing house that grew from Charles H. Hyer’s shop. Collectors need this page to stop collapsing three different objects: the founding artisan, the Kansas factory that sold in 1977, and the later Olathe Boot Company line now handmade in Mercedes, Texas.

A 2020s consumer pair marked HYER is a separate relaunch. It is not a 1910 Hyer factory boot.

Company history

Kansapedia dates the founding story to 1875, when a cowboy asked Charles H. Hyer for a first-class pair of boots. After discarding two unsatisfactory pairs, Hyer delivered a third that pleased the rider. Letters followed from across the West, and brother Ed joined the shop. The brothers developed a mail-order measurement chart so remote ranch customers could order by mail.

The Kansas Historical Society records sketch traces the firm names: first Olathe Boot Company, then Hyer Brothers in the 1880s, later C.H. Hyer & Sons, and after 1949 incorporation Hyer Boot Company. By 1900 the workforce had grown from two people to about fifteen. A three-story brick building opened in 1903, an adjacent hotel was converted in 1914, and a new 23,000-square-foot plant opened in 1964. During World War I the house made officers’ boots for Fort Leavenworth and Camp Funston. The same sketch says Depression-era work included military boots when cowboy orders fell. By 1965 Hyer had more than 360,000 customer patterns on file. By the 1960s more than seventy people made boots for a worldwide clientele.

Kansapedia’s Hyer Cowboy Boots entry records that in 1961 Kansas Governor John Anderson outfitted the other forty-nine governors in Hyer boots for the annual Governors’ Conference gift exchange. The KSHS sketch names pattern-file customers including Roy Rogers, Will Rogers, Tom Mix, William S. Hart, Dwight Eisenhower, Clark Gable, Theodore Roosevelt, Buffalo Bill Cody, Calvin Coolidge, and Richard Nixon. A famous name in a pattern file does not authenticate an unlabeled pair.

C. A. Hyer and A. E. Hyer sold to the Kansas City M.O.B. management group in 1968. The house was sold to Ben Miller Boot Company of El Paso in 1977. Kansapedia records that Miller moved the equipment to El Paso and later brought the Hyer name back in the 1990s. Olathe Boot Company is a related later line, not the same corporation.