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Kirin J. Makker is an Assistant Professor of Architectural Studies at Hobart William Smith Colleges in Geneva, New York, and the recipient of a 2014 Strochlitz Travel Grant.\u00a0 Travel Grants are awarded bi-annually to scholars and students to support their travel to and research in Archives and Special Collections.\u00a0 Part of the following essay also draws on materials at Winterthur Library, where this year Dr. Makker is also being supported by a National Endowment for the Humanities residential fellowship. To learn more about the book she is working on, please <\/i>go here<\/i><\/a>.<\/i><\/i><\/p>\n I went to Archives & Special Collections of the University of Connecticut Libraries to spend a couple of days sifting through the records of the E. Ingraham Company.\u00a0 I\u2019m working on a book about the history of small town development when it boomed around 1900 and a major part of my research methodology involves following the trail of company goods right at the moment big capitalism really spread its wings (see blog The Myths of Main Street<\/a>).\u00a0 My hope is to track where a handful of companies sold their goods in order to describe a product\u2019s national distribution, and hence its availability across small town America.\u00a0 I have found, and my research will argue, that one of the reasons that small town America is such a consistent idea in the nation\u2019s cultural language is that the goods exchanged there had both local and national parameters. Some of this research has had to do with companies that literally produced small town America:\u00a0 the storefronts, the brick-making machinery, the lamp posts.\u00a0 But other parts of the research is about the everyday objects that were sold in small towns, and how most of them during the period of small town America\u2019s boom were not made locally or even regionally.\u00a0 The retailers were locals, but the items for sale on Main Street were typically sourced from manufactories or large distributors in cities.<\/p>\n For example, a $2 watch made by the E. Ingraham Company in 1898 was made in Bristol, Connecticut but was sold on several thousand Main Streets all across America in general stores or small jewelry shops.\u00a0 Ingraham was after the mass market that the very successful company Robert H. Ingersoll had been selling to.\u00a0 Ingersoll had shrewdly introduced a $1 pocket watch, the \u201cYankee,\u201d in 1892, stumbling into an enormous mass market of working- and middle-class consumers interested in owning timepieces they could afford.<\/p>\n Although Ingraham couldn\u2019t make a quality watch for that little (the Ingersoll watches, not surprisingly, were cheap but not known for quality), they did start making a $2 watch by 1900 and these sold quite well, judging by how long they produced this watch (until the 1950s).\u00a0 Yet, when I dug around the Ingraham Company archives in Archives & Special Collections, I had some trouble finding records to support their efforts to take a share of the Ingersoll Yankee\u2019s market.<\/p>\n As I said, I set out to spend all my time on the Ingraham Clock Company archive.\u00a0 However, it turned out that what I was really hoping to find within my time period (1870-1930, Main Street\u2019s \u2018boom period,\u2019 so to speak), wasn\u2019t so easy to cull.\u00a0 I had set out to identify names and locations of retailers who ordered Ingraham watches for their shops on Main Streets in towns all over the country.\u00a0 Or possibly find advertising by the company that included testimonials from retailers in small towns.\u00a0 I have found these types of testimonials for Elgin watches of the period, so I was hopeful.\u00a0 However, most of the Ingraham Company\u2019s order records in Archives & Special Collections show sales to large distributors in cities.\u00a0 In addition, most of the records in the collection were from the 1940s and 50s (just the luck of what records survived, unfortunately).\u00a0 I did find contract letters with Sears from the 1930s, in which the mega-retailer agreed to uniquely market Ingraham watches in their stores and catalogs.\u00a0 But I needed letters with Sears or Montgomery Ward from around 1905 or more information about the distributors who bought $2 watches in large volume and then re-sold them in small batches to shopowners in the nation\u2019s towns.\u00a0 That information may or may not be available in any archives, so in the end, the Ingraham $2 pocket watch story might not make it into the book.<\/p>\n However, as typically happens for me, as soon as I turn my attention away from one enticing collection, I find myself in the midst of a host of material that suits some other aspect of the book research.\u00a0 (Nothing, I tell you, NOTHING beats the fun of serendipity in the archives!)<\/p>\n What did I find?\u00a0 A glorious collection of ephemera and sales records for the E.E. Dickinson Witch Hazel Company of Essex, Connecticut.\u00a0 One of the chapters I\u2019m writing is on the variety of goods and services related to a townsperson\u2019s health, all of which they could get on Main Street.\u00a0 There was quite a bit of overlap between what was a \u201cgood\u201d, a \u201cservice\u201d and also a ways to participate in community life in the many shops and offices in downtown small town America between 1870-1930.\u00a0 For example, one might go to the town druggist to purchase a prescription from a local doctor, a box of candy, or sit at the soda fountain and gab with friends over a strawberry fizz.\u00a0 Barber and beauty shops were where one got one\u2019s haircut or styled, but also where one socialized with a gendered group of residents.\u00a0 Doctors were where one received diagnoses and health recommendations, but also where one might purchase a drug remedy (many physicians made their own drugs during the early part of my period of study).\u00a0 I\u2019m interested in looking at how Americans living in small towns attended to their health needs because understanding healthcare history before drug and health insurance, medical malpractice, and managed care may be valuable for understanding our contemporary struggles with the industry.\u00a0 Or at the very least, this history offers an interesting comparison to the practices and standards the current day.<\/p>\n The story of Dickinson\u2019s Witch Hazel fits right into this chapter because it was a factory-produced astringent that became an everyday remedy for minor ills.\u00a0 It was sold all over the country in drugstores and used extensively in small town doctor\u2019s offices.\u00a0 And this time, I found records that show national distribution.\u00a0 For example, during the mid-1920s there were many letters between Dickinson executives and the Druggist Supply Corporation (DSC).\u00a0 The DSC was made up of retailers across America, many of which were located in small towns (Fresno, CA; Peoria, IL; Ottumwa, IA; Burlington, IA; Fort Wayne, IN; Rock Island, IL among many others).\u00a0 By working with that organization, Dickinson assured that they would get their product into those shop owners\u2019 hands.<\/p>\n There were also several large company scrapbooks with hundreds of ads, letters from happy vendors, testimonials, and the like.\u00a0 For example, there was a letter from the owner of a drug store in Grand Rapids, Michigan.\u00a0 He was thanking the Dickinson Company for sending him a set of booklets to give out to his customers with their purchase of a bottle of Witch Hazel.\u00a0 With his letter of thanks, he included a clipping from the local newspaper which documents his announcement of the Witch Hazel booklet\u2019s availability.\u00a0 He also noted that he gave a bunch of the booklets to a teacher at a nearby rural school for their students.<\/p>\n I could go on and on, but you\u2019ll have to wait for the book.\u00a0 Overall, my visit to Archives & Special Collections was a success, both in terms of clarifying the role of Ingraham in the book and adding to my health-related goods and services chapter.\u00a0 [KJM] <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" [slideshow_deploy id=’4475′] Kirin J. Makker is an Assistant Professor of Architectural Studies at Hobart William Smith Colleges in Geneva, New York, and the recipient of a 2014 Strochlitz Travel Grant.\u00a0 Travel Grants are awarded bi-annually to scholars and students … Continue reading
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