Henry W. Shoemaker

Henry Wharton Shoemaker (February 24, 1880 – July 14, 1958) was a prominent American folklorist, historian, diplomat, writer, publisher, and conservationist.

Shoemaker was born in New York City, but was closely associated with Pennsylvania, where he spent summers in childhood and took up residence later in life. His father, Henry Francis Shoemaker (1845–1918), was a railroad magnate, investment banker, and close confidante of future Senator and Vice Presidential candidate Charles W. Fairbanks. His mother, Blanche Quiggle, was the sole daughter of railroad magnate and diplomat Col. James W. Quiggle of Philadelphia and Lock Haven, Pennsylvania. He attended the E. D. Lyons Classical School and Columbia University. He then served in the military and attained the rank of Colonel. Attracted to foreign service, he worked in European embassies before returning home to enter a brokerage venture with his brother William. His brother died in an elevator accident, and Henry closed the brokerage.

Shoemaker summered in McElhattan, Pennsylvania, at an estate called Restless Oaks owned by his mother's family, and wrote that this experience deeply influenced his lifelong devotion to folklore and legend, hunting heritage, and historical and environmental preservation. Familiar with the Roosevelt family in New York, he was a supporter of Theodore Roosevelt's calls for the values of strenuosity, conservation, and Progressivism. Shoemaker, for example, founded the Alpine Club in Pennsylvania to encourage mountain climbing and hiking, and wrote one of the first tourist guides to the natural wonders of Pennsylvania in Eldorado Found (1917).

After his brief stint on Wall Street, Shoemaker turned to publishing, running newspapers in Reading, Altoona, and Jersey Shore, Pennsylvania. He was also an active writer, which he had begun in student publications at Columbia. He gained notice as a journalist after 1898, when he reported legends from Pennsylvania mountain residents and workers in lumber and hunting camps and coalfields, which he first published in central Pennsylvania newspapers and then more widely in the book Pennsylvania Mountain Stories (1908). This was the first of twelve volumes in the Pennsylvania Folklore Series (1908–1924) that promoted the culture and landscape of central Pennsylvania.

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