Rancourt & Co.

Rancourt & Co. is the whole Lewiston shoemaking story in one company: a Quebec shoemaker who came south in the 1950s to learn the trade, a factory opened in 1967, a sale in the 1990s, a threatened closure in 2008, and a father and son buying the plant back to keep it running.

The claim is unqualified — all of the footwear, in the one factory — and unusually, so are the inputs. The about page lists every leather Rancourt uses with the tannery that made it, and all of them are American: Horween in Chicago, S.B. Foot in Red Wing. Most footwear records here have to sit one mark lower because the manufacture is domestic and the materials are not. This one does not.

We checked the Dirigo line specifically, because “essentials for less” is exactly where a domestic shoemaker normally starts importing. It is made in Maine too, from surplus and discontinued leathers — cheaper inputs, same factory.