I'm not so sure about the clasps. In the 19th century there was a
"Suffolk Rubber Shoe" company in Setauket, NY, next-door to today's
Stony Brook University, and where the Society for the Preservation of
Long Antiquities once had its interpretative headquarters (an actual
case of "case bottles" unbroken! When they moved a house there, they
found some 1/2 or 1/4 doubloons in the ground which still has everone
scratching their head I imagine). Anyway, the shoe became a really big
shoe company, Melco, last time I looked (Thom McCann and others, and
drug stores, etc.) the Melville family that has also endowed the Stony
Brook Foundation which has supported some archaeology in the past I
worked on. What does this have to do with galoshes? I'm not sure maybe
there are some records at the museums there in the village of Stony
Brook of the "Setauketeers" that sailed to Brazil to bring back the
rubber and with it the "rubber shoes".

One of the Melville's, Ward Melville, I think (the Social Sciences
Building at Stony Brook University is named after them too, they
donated a lot of the property, their idea sort of and a local high
school nearby is named after him and produces many "science fair"
scholarship winners) spoke back in the early 1960's I think, at the
American Philosophical Association, a presentation recorded on the
importance of preservation in the landscape of American history, and
some of the planning that tried to safeguard the village of Stony
Brook and its Museums from a suburban sprall which can still be seen
today (carriage museum, Stanford White designed church, post office
with hourly flapping eagle wings, small harbor and dockside
restaurant, said to be haunted, etc.) Maybe someone reading this is
familiar with the collections there.