Remember Trading Stamps?

As we were going through some papers at mom's recently, my younger brother Richard came across these relics from the past--trading stamps. Mom was a big user of these back in the day; my wife Dianne tells me her mother was, too. The ones we found were S&H Green Stamps, Plaid Stamps [a program of the A&P company] and Top Value Stamps. 

According to Wikipedia, trading stamps were first used in 1891 at a department store in Wisconsin. Five years later the Sperry and Hutchinson Company began offering its line of stamps to retailers; by 1957 around 200 companies had entered the business. In addition to the three seen here, other prominent companies included Gold Bond Stamps and Blue Chip Stamps. In the late 1950s in the U.S. around 250,000 retail outlets were offering stamps and almost two-thirds of households saved them. Stamps could be redeemed for all sorts of products. 

Most trading stamps were given at supermarkets, grocery stores and gas stations; that practice began to decline in the 1970s for various reasons. In 2008 the last remaining company in the printed stamps field in the U.S., Eagle Stamps, shut down operations. S&H Green Stamps closed its online "Greenpoints" program in 2020 and also announced that the classic printed stamps no longer had any value.

Top Value stamps shut down in the 1980s and S&H honored them for a while. At its height, S&H had its own redemption centers in larger cities. In Alabama these centers, which were like department stores, operated in Montgomery, Birmingham and Huntsville and perhaps other locations. 

I don't remember anything specific mom purchased with such stamps, but I imagine most items were practical!

Pondering Alabama Maps (10): A Neat One from 1906

I've written quite a few posts on this blog related to maps. I've done a series "Pondering Alabama Maps" with nine entries including Pelham in 1917, 1926 and 1928; early state road maps; an 1867 railroad map, a 1913 highway proposal, and Shelby County in 1822 and 1825. I've also covered more recent state highway maps and Benton County in 1852.

So here we are again, pondering an Alabama map. As with so many things, I stumbled across this one on the Alabama Mosaic site. The map was published in 1906 by the Geographical Publishing Company of Chicago, which existed from around 1893 until 1966. Perhaps the Birmingham News was one of several clients for which the company produced similar maps. 

The map notes that the News is "Alabama's Greatest Newspaper" and has the "Largest Circulation of Alabama Newspapers." The annual subscription cost for delivery on a rural route was $3.40; by mail $5.00. I presume most sales at this time were on newsstands and from young boys hawking each day's issue on the sidewalks. 

Shown on the map are the governors of Alabama and the state capitol building in Montgomery. The map copyright is 1906, but oddly Governor B.B. Comer is included; he served 1907 until 1911. His election took place in 1906, however. 

Each county on the map includes numerous towns and cities. Naturally when I look at old state maps I look for Pelham and it's on this one, right there between Helena and Keystone. Although its growth did not begin until the 1970s, Pelham has been around since the 1870s.

If you look at this map on the Mosaic web site, you can zoom in for closer examination.

In these Days of Modern Times (2)

Sometimes I just want to do something silly on this blog, so here we are. Again.

Back in October 2021 I posted some photographs of our front porch. Here's what I said then:

We seem to have had a lot of Amazon orders delivered lately [for some mysterious reason!], and many of them come with an email and a photograph of the item(s) on our porch. I present some here for the general amusement of the  readers to show the endless variety of Amazon delivery placement on this porch. The [Halloween] pumpkins are keeping watch. 

A tip of the hat to all the anonymous Amazon drivers and photographers out there.

So now I'm back with a whole new set. These are from April and May 2022. 

To be continued, I'm sure...

1 April 2022 

Some of these can be rather artistic. 

2 April 2022

6 April 2022 

20 April 2022

24 April 2022

26 April 2022

30 April 2022

2 May 2022

5 May 2022

11 May 2022

Grand Theater in Huntsville

Recently my brother Richard and I were going through some papers at mom's house in Huntsville, and we found this piece torn from a newspaper many years ago. Mom saved an item on the other side, but this side gives the source and date and includes an advertisement for a movie showing at the Grand Theater. Neither Richard nor I remembered the Grand even though we both grew up in Huntsville. So naturally I decided to investigate.

I found some information on the Cinema Treasures site and a page devoted to Huntsville movie theaters. The Grand first opened in April 1920 on Jefferson Street, but that original movie house burned in December 1924. Its replacement opened the following year and featured a Robert Morton theater organ. The Theater closed on May 25, 1960.

As the ad below notes, the theater featured the final local showings that day of The Bridge On the River Kwai, a classic World War II film released on December 14, 1957, in the United States. I suspect the Grand was a second-run theater at the time of this ad, since the film is showing there six months after its U.S. release.

Can't beat those ticket prices, though! 

Alabama Slaves Auctioned in New Orleans in 1858

The digital collections of the Smithsonian Institution are a rich source of Alabama-related materials. In a recent wandering there I came across the item below.

That item is a broadside advertising a slave auction in New Orleans on March 25, 1858. As noted, the auction took place in the rotunda of the St. Louis Hotel, built in 1838 at the corner of St. Louis and Chartres Street. Such auctions were common there before the Civil War. The hotel, rebuilt in 1960, continues to operate as the Omni Royal Orleans.

Of course, one thing about this broadside really caught my attention. Thirteen slaves were to be auctioned, eight were from Alabama and the others being "acclimated slaves". His wife Martha and their four children were included with George, so there are actually thirteen from the state:

Absalom, 28, plantation hand

Ned, 43, plantation hand

Tom, about 46, plantation hand

Bill, 23, plantation hand

Frank, 25, plantation hand

Alfred, 35, plantation hand

Polly, 23, cook, washer and ironer

George, 23, plantation hand and carriage driver; to be sold with his wife Martha, 30 and their four children, Ned, 7, Nancy 6, Horace, 4, and Mary, 1

The broadside gives more details about the eight that might be of interest to the buyer or in the interest of full disclosure by the seller. 

One question immediately arises: why weren't these slaves auctioned in Montgomery, which had a large slave market for many years? A slave market also operated in Mobile. Perhaps transport of the slaves to one of the New Orleans markets would bring higher prices. Also unknown is whether these slaves came from the same Alabama plantation. 

I did manage to find some information on the slave auctioneer, "N. Vignie". The Louisiana Statewide Death Index gives Norbert Vignie's birth year as 1811 and death date as April 29, 1877, in New Orleans. The 1850 U.S. Census notes his occupation as auctioneer in the "Miscellaneous Business Services" industry. 

Vignie's office is given on the broadside as No. 8 Banks' Arcade Passage; the Arcade was a block-long structure built in 1833 by Thomas Banks. The building is now the St. James Hotel. He also lists the corner of Conti Street and Exchange Alley, the site of numerous office and retail establishments over the years. Presumably he had two offices, which might mean he was very active in the slave trade auctions in the city. 

In 1870 the U.S. Census listed him as living in Ward 6 of New Orleans, perhaps at the 293 Royal Street that appeared in the 1875 city directory. His occupation? "Retired auctioneer."

Too bad we can't follow the life stories of the slaves beyond this broadside. 

Source: Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture

St. Louis Hotel 

Source: Wikipedia

Google maps shows this building at 293 Royal Street in New Orleans, near the Hotel Monteleone, and perhaps Vignie's last address.

Train Robber Rube Burrow in the Dime Novels (1)

Back in the day I did a good bit of research and writing on crime in the South and in Alabama. In 1989 my book Criminal Activity in the Deep South, 1700-1930: An Annotated Bibliography was published and is still available from the publisher and other sources. I've also published articles on Texas gunfighter John Wesley Hardin's sojourn into Alabama. Another topic has been train robber Rube Burrow [1855-1890], and that article brings us to today's posting.

Burrow has been the subject of much ink over the years. One of the best recent books is Rick Miller's Rube Burrow, Desperado published in 2014. Miller is a well-known author on outlaw and western topics. Barbara Carruth's Legends of Rube Burrow & Gang appeared in 2021. You can peruse many other books here. Articles are also numerous.

Since the universe of published material on Burrow and his associates is so large, I decided to write on his career in dime novels, the cheap literature of crime, adventure and romance stories that dominated "lower class" reading markets in America in the second half of the 19th century. The output of one firm alone, Beadle and Adams, was enormous. Beginning in 1859, the company published over 1400 titles. Thousands more from other publishers were issued into the 1920s. Another popular format was the story papers, published roughly 1850-1910, which were issued weekly. By the 1920s pulp magazines had pretty much replaced both formats. 

I discuss several of the nine Burrow dime novels in this article, as well as offering some background on the form and Burrow the historical figure. In Part 2 of this post, I'll offer covers of some of these dime novels, some photos of the real Burrow, links to dime novel resources online and a bibliography of further reading in print sources. 

As noted in the last image, this article was published in the Quarterly of the National Association and Center for Outlaw and Lawman History, based at the time of publication in 1992 at the University of Wyoming. The publication and organization has a convoluted history, but lasted in some form from the late 1970s until about 2007. 

Part 2 of this post is here. 

Train Robber Rube Burrow in the Dime Novels (2)

You can read the first part of this blog post here.

Part 2 includes some of the covers and title pages of the Rube Burrow dime novels. I've also appended a bibliography on dime novels I compiled back in the day.

Further comments are below some of the covers. 

Two of many dime novel resources online are here and here. 

You can read this one at the Internet Archive.

George W. Agee was Superintendent of the Southern Express Company's Western Division and coordinated efforts to capture Burrow. Other dime novels draw heavily from his account. 

William Ward's ca. 1900 novel; note the difference in subtitles between the cover and title page. Ward was a prolific dime novelist; he wrote more than 30 on Jesse James and his gang alone. 

Source: eBay

The Log Cabin Library was published between about 1889 and 1897 by dime novel publisher Street and Smith; over 450 issues appeared. Burrow is a detective in this work of total fiction. Author W.B. Lawson was actually St. George Rathbone [1854-1898].  Like so many dime novels and similar literature, this item is very rare. The real Burrow did have some connection with Florida but not as a detective! An excellent review of Burrow's real Florida adventures by William Warren Rogers, Jr., can be found here. In the second footnote Dr. Rogers gives a bibliographical listing of all the Burrow dime novels. 

This title by "Harry Hawkeye" was published in 1908. Hawkeye was actually Paul Emilius J. Lowe. You can read the book here. The drawing below is taken from Hawkeye.

Cover Source: Amazon

Source: Wikipedia

Source: Encyclopedia of Alabama