Kirkendall

Why collectors care

F.P. Kirkendall Boot Company was an Omaha riding-boot factory that collectors still meet on Challenger stock pairs and Diamond K or Bench Made customs. The house sits with C.H. Hyer and Justin as a Plains mail-order and working-cowboy manufacturer, not a Texas bench.

Taxonomy here is manufacturing company. No founder biography is locked here beyond the firm name on the Millard Block marker.

Company history

An Old Market historical marker on the Millard Block, 1880–1881, at about 1105 Harney Street, records that by the beginning of the twentieth century the F.P. Kirkendall Boot Company occupied the building and was once described as the world’s largest producer of riding boots, supplying working cowboys and naming King Gustav V of Sweden and Emperor Yoshihito of Japan among customers. Those royal names are marker language, not pair certificates.

The same marker records a fire on the night of 28 January 1905 that gutted the interior but left thirty-inch-thick walls. The interior was rebuilt and a fifth floor added, and the Kirkendall factory stayed about another fifty years.

A related Millard–Kirkendall and Jones building at 1102 Harney Street housed Kirkendall, Jones & Company, a wholesale boot and shoe firm, in the late nineteenth century. Omaha Exploration notes a 1920 Durham Museum photograph of men making leather boots at Kirkendall, Jones and Company, and says the boot-and-shoe company reorganized and moved across the street by the 1890s. Caption the wholesale Jones partnership separately from the later F.P. Kirkendall factory in the Millard Block.