The Ranco Family Moccasin Shop
Stitched Across Generations
Joe Ranco, expert guide and canoe builder
The Ranco family has owned and operated the Indian Moccasin Shop in Wells for nearly 75 years. Their story stitches together Penobscot families and traditions across time and place, threading the past into the present, and on into the future.
The Nicolar family, along with Ranco family, traveled from Indian Island to Kennebunkport each summer for almost fifty years to sell baskets and other goods to wealthy tourists, camping on their ancestral summer territory alongside other Penobscot and Passamaquoddy families.
Emma Nicolar, born in January 1868, was the eldest daughter of Joseph and Elizabeth, and was a revered basketmaker. Joseph Ranco, born April 1865, was a birchbark canoe maker, honoring Penobscot peoples’ ancestral relationship to the rivers. Emma and Joseph were married and had eight children. Their youngest, Leslie Ranco, married Valentine “Val” Little Deer Lewis, also a Penobscot citizen. They had two children, Joan June Rain, and Ronald.
Just over a decade after their seasonal family encampment was torn down in Kennebunkport by white landowners, Val and Leslie opened the Moccasin Shop on Route 1 in Wells in 1951. Leslie would travel out into the community to measure customers’ feet, and return to the shop to make moccasins. The shop grew to include baskets and other traditional crafts. Val continued to run the shop with her daughter, June, after Leslie passed away in 1996. When Val passed away in 2008, she was the eldest living Penobscot Nation member.
Today, the shop, layered with photos and memorabilia from the family, is still run by June’s children.
Val Ranco and a customer
“Today, a Pow wow is held—the annual Val Ranco Pow Wow—each year in honor of June’s mother, Valentine, named for the holiday. This is the 16th year of the event, which started in 2008, the year Val Ranco passed. She was ninety-six, the oldest living Penobscot at that time”
Leslie and Val Ranco 1942 - Times Square
June Ranco
“I enjoy talking to ’em. Just like my dad. He’d stand right there, making his moccasins, and customers would come in here and talk, talk, talk. They’d talk for hours. And sometimes they don’t buy anything. He didn’t care. He says, ‘I just like to talk with them.’ So I guess I must take after him. They love it, and they’ll ask me questions, and I’ll answer their questions, you know. And sometimes they buy something, which is fine. But they keep coming back, you know? They keep coming back. So that’s good. ”
Reflection Questions
Have you visited the Ranco Moccasin shop?
This research was compiled as part of the Just History Walk: Lives Between Two Rivers, which took place in Kennebunk on November 8, 2025. For more information about this walk, click here. For more research related to this area, click on the tags below. To download a hi-res version of the posters below for educational use, please contact where@atlanticblackbox.com.
Poster by Meadow Dibble