Aroostook County
Historical & Art Museum
of Houlton
Sabots
A sabot (sa·buht) is a clog or wooden shoe from France and surrounding countries such as Belgium and Italy.
Sabots are whole feet clogs, a shoe made of hollowed-out wood. They looked different than the Dutch traditional wooden shoes that we often see.
Both men and women wore heavy woolen socks in natural color and sabots, sometimes lined with straw to absorb humidity.
Made of a block of a light hard wood such as willow or poplar.
After rawhide shoes came into use, clogs were used mainly as overshoes in rain or on the muddy soil of the fields.
Sabots were in the 16th to 19th centuries, associated with the lower classes, they were traditional peasant footwear.
The word sabot is probably related to savate, a Middle French word for an old shoe.
During this period, the years of the Industrial Revolution the word sabotage gained currency.
Allegedly derived from sabot, sabotage described the actions of disgruntled workers who willfully damaged workplace machinery by throwing their sabots into the works.
However, according to some accounts, sabot-clad workers were simply considered less productive than others who had switched to leather shoes, roughly equating the term "sabotage" with "inefficiency.
These have leather straps across the top which were common.
We feel these are from the 1850’s and were from Arcadia part of northern Maine.