Those Happy Days

 

QUESTION: After the death of my mother, I’ve started to clear out my parent’s house to get it ready for sale. Among the items I’ve been sorting through were a good number of what I believe were things from the 1950s. Since I was only a small child during that time, I’m really not exactly sure what is from back then. Can you give me an idea of the type of things that might have some resale value and where I might sell them?

ANSWER: The 1950s were a time of relative prosperity after the end of World War II. However, items from back then fall into two categories—higher end pieces like futuristically designed furniture and accessories and everyday items like kitchen and household wares. And collectors are pretty much divided into these two groups, also.

Many people, especially younger ones, view the 1950s as a time of carefree happy days. The T.V. show “Happy Days” did a lot to help that a long. But, in fact, the decade was filled with rules and restrictions, the result of which caused the backlash among younger people in the 1960s.  But recently collectors have been resurrecting and rediscovering the era, albeit while wearing rose-colored glasses.

However, the 1950s was a decade of creative solutions and bold designs. Objects once outdated, corny and embarrassing, whose final resting place was yard sales and thrift stores, are now found in pricey shops in major cities. This serious second look from dealers,. collectors and architects transcends all the outlandish fads, weird shapes, silly ideas and annoying colors. What they’re now seeing are progressive designs and superb workmanship, mostly on the high-end pieces. 

Transitional best describes the Fifties decade. America was passing out of the dark, serious, wartime 1940s into a colorful era of discovery, experimentation, and prosperity. Veterans were starting families in the suburban developments like Levittown in both Long Island and southeastern Pennsylvania. Mom’s found themselves bound by their apron strings in the kitchen while dads went off to work. Dwight Eisenhower led the country while Willie Mays and Mickey Mantle dominated centerfield. And automobiles were large, showy, and powerful.  

Designers, fueled by the exploration of outer space, applied the graceful, soft curves and lines of Art Deco to furniture and appliances, which took on streamlined, futuristic shapes. When the Russians launched the world’s first satellite, Sputnik, in October 1957, merchandise that resembled sleek spacecraft seemed all the more apropos for the times.

News broadcasts came over Bakelite and C radios that sported rounded, curved lines and often bold coloring. Designers adopted shiny chrome for lamps, table and chair legs, blenders, toasters, and waffle irons. Tubular steel added simplicity, beauty and durability to furniture and accessories. Lighting fixtures and clocks sprouted appendages resembling sparkling celestial bodies or satellites.

For the growing middle class, manufacturers employed chrome's step-sister, aluminum, to mass-produce inexpensive tumblers, goblets, cocktail shakers, trays and ice buckets. Plastic, especially red, could be found in most kitchens in condiment containers and curtains. Cabinets contained Fiesta ware, simple, pastel-colored dishes for everyday use.

Decorative figurines became popular. No living room was complete without a black ceramic panther slinking on a tabletop or used as a lamp base. Small ceramic lamps with a doll, animal, or other figure, marketed as the perfect little glow to set atop the TV, supposedly helped to save viewers’ eyesight in darkened rooms.

Coffee tables assumed the shape of boomerangs. Wall clocks looked like exploding, atoms or models of molecular structure. Kitchen tables, made of durable Formica in bright red, yellow, and often turquoise, complemented shiny white enamel hanging cabinets. Builders of new suburban homes tiled the bathrooms in black and pink or sea green. 

In the better part of towns, a sophisticated 1950's home might contain a pair of Eero Saarinen's all-enveloping womb chairs in bright red, or had as its piece de resistance a free form, walnut and glass coffee table designed by Isamu Noguchi. 

Baby boomers, looking to recall items with which they grew up, have fueled the current interest in what’s now commonly referred to as the Mid-Century Modern style—taking in the 1950s and 1960s. They perceive the Fifties as an innocent time compared to now.

Manufacturers designed products for the Machine Age, using mass-production and assembly line methods. Thus, many of today’s collectors seek pieces developed by specific designers whose creations bring higher prices.

Charles Eames worked for the Herman Miller Company of Zeeland, Mich. He popularized furniture made of laminated plywood and bentwood. George Nelson, also of Herman Miller, designed clocks and furniture. Paul Frankl designed furniture from the 1920s to the 1950s. Influenced by Art Deco, he used both geometric and curved shapes. His simple, black and white, curved lacquered pine tables and desks today sell for several thousand dollars each.

Knoll International of New York employed Eero Saarinen. Best-known for his molded plastic womb chair, he worked also in cast aluminum. Italian immigrant and sculptor Harry Bertoia also designed for Knoll, where he pioneered in using metal rods and wire in side and lounge chairs. And Gilbert Rohde, also associated with the Herman Miller Company, combined traditional mahogany and maple with chrome and glass.

Russel Wright worked in glass, plastics, aluminum, textiles, pottery and furniture. He designed tableware for the Steubenville Pottery Company, Iroquois China Company, and Harker Chinaware. And he developed furniture for Knoll and Heywood Wakefield.

Unlike painters, these artists didn’t sign their work, so collectors need to learn to identify furniture by shapes, materials, and quality of workmanship. Although the furniture usually had manufacturer data on paper labels, many of the labels have long since fallen off.

Other companies mass-produced less expensive look-alike imitations of designer furniture. And the U.S. courts refused to allow the original designers to legally. protect their work, which further complicated matters.

Fifties merchandise sells consistently well, especially chrome kitchen appliances, decanters, cake covers and lazy Susans. During the 1990s, items from the 1950s was cheap by today’s standards. But as the popularity of these items has grown, so have the prices. Aluminum Christmas trees, illuminated by a revolving color wheel, are a good example. Once castaways, they now sell for over $150.

And while Fifties kitchen appliances are still popular with collectors, especially if they’re in excellent condition, the market for them has softened somewhat.  However, colorful Bakelite and Catalin radios still sell for three figures.

As far as selling items from the 1950s, both eBay and Etsy are probably the best bet. Selling them at yard or garage sales or fleamarkets won’t really yield much of a profit. Regardless of the site, the Internet offers a global market with the possibility of selling at higher prices.   

The consensus among dealers today is that a lot of 1950s furnishings sit in attics, basements, and thrift shops waiting to be purchased for a song by the wise buyer who has memorized the music. And that means that happy days may be making comeback.

To read more articles on antiques, please visit the Antiques Articles section of my Web site.  And to stay up to the minute on antiques and collectibles, please join the over 30,000 readers by following my free online magazine, #TheAntiquesAlmanac. Learn more about "Advertising of the Past" in the 2023 Spring Edition, online now. And to read daily posts about unique objects from the past and their histories, like the #Antiques and More Collection on Facebook.

  

Artful China

 

QUESTION: A friend of mine recently gave me a colorful vase that has two handles and a design of some sort of fruit on the front. The mark on the bottom says “Laughlin Art China” along with the image of an eagle. Can you tell me what company made this and when? 

ANSWER: Your vase is one of hundreds of pieces produced by the Laughlin China Company in the first decade of the 20th century. While the company made some of the pieces, such as soup tureens and platters, it made most of its pieces for display only.

At the turn of the 20th century, American potteries, formerly limited to the production of dinnerware and washstand toilet sets, took a cue from the vogue for American art pottery and began developing decorative "specialty ware" or art china.

Characterized by unusual decals surrounded by a background of solid color applied with an air brush or atomizer, these wares mimicked the standard glaze and hand-painted ware of such art potteries as Rookwood, Roseville and Weller. At first, manufacturers used a brown background but soon changed that to bright red, magenta, green, blue-green, pink and sometimes combinations of several colors. The first American pottery to popularize the style seems to have been the Warwick Pottery of Wheeling, West Virginia. 

Many potteries in the Ohio Valley quickly copied the art china concept. None, however, elaborated up on the idea with more verve and success than Homer Laughlin China of East Liverpool, Ohio, which began production if its art china in 1900. 

But neither Homer nor Shakespeare Laughlin, the founders of Homer Laughlin China Co., had anything to do with the development of Laughlin Art China. The brothers did develop a whiteware pottery on a subscription basis in East Liverpool in 1873, but Shakespeare dropped out in 1877. While Homer Laughlin expanded the company, beginning the production of semi-vitreous porcelain in the 1890s and incorporating the company in 1896, he retired two years later and moved to California.

During these early years, there was one notable and highly successful effort by Laughlin China to produce artistic china-ware. Around 1886, the company succeeded. Marked with the words "Laughlin China" in a horseshoe, workers frequently decorated it  using the French pate-sur-pate technique, with cameo-like white designs on a blue ground. But such ware is rare, as Laughlin only made it for three years.

Under new management, notably that of William E. Wells, the Laughlin pottery continued to expand, completing a second plant in East Liverpool's East End in 1900, soon followed by a third plant. In 1903,. it traded plants with the National China Co. and then enjoyed a combined capacity of 35 kilns.

Shapes that are known to have been used for Laughlin specialties include American Sweetheart, King Charles, Genesee, Hudson and The Angelus. A number of these shapes, notably Kwaker, continued in production as late as the 1940s, 

Beginning in 1903, Laughlin China marked its art china specialties with a gold stamp featuring an eagle trying its wings, over a script "Laughlin." The firm sold the first pieces that same year, but they didn’t appear in company sales literature until 1905. Actual production seems to have been limited to five or six years.

Laughlin produced more than 130 different shapes and sizes of its art china with a currant decal, the most common form of decoration. 

But the White Pets design, the best known, featured a series of dogs, cats and birds, the most common being a pair of pointers, usually shown amid a clump of cattails. The use of a decal showing a pair of white cockatoos may have been a response to Warwick China's striking use of white birds on a white ground.

Another popular Laughlin Art China pattern was Dreamland, bearing a variety of Kate Greenaway-like children's scenes, usually involving a goat, with a blended yellow, green and brown back-ground. Like White Pets, this line often lacked the Laughlin Art China eagle backstamp and simply bore the line name. Unlike White Pets, Dreamland was decorated not with a simple decal but by "pouncing," a process in which the design was enhanced by the addition of small particles of carbon pigment, particularly effective in the cartoon-like Dreamland and Holland decorations. Other cartoon-like decorative lines utilized a variety of frog decals, most likely inspired by Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows.

Other companies occasionally decorated Homer Laughlin blanks using different decals and decorating techniques. Perhaps most notable was the little-known McKean Pottery of Minerva, Ohio, which specialized in a faux wood grain decorative background, a line which they called Angora. 

With Laughlin art china, condition is very important, particularly in collecting art china decorated with the air-brushed background, since this type of decoration wears easily. Because Laughlin intended some of its art china to be used, the delicate nature of the decoration was a problem and may be part of the reason for its decline in popularity. However, some pieces are so rare that even substantial amounts of wear don’t rule out significant prices.

To read more articles on antiques, please visit the Antiques Articles section of my Web site.  And to stay up to the minute on antiques and collectibles, please join the over 30,000 readers by following my free online magazine, #TheAntiquesAlmanac. Learn more about "folk art" in the 2023 Winter Edition, online now. And to read daily posts about unique objects from the past and their histories, like the #Antiques and More Collection on Facebook.

A Chest by Any Other Name

 

QUESTION: I have inherited a chest that originally belonged to my great-grandmother which had been passed down to her daughter, my grandmother, then to my mother, her daughter. My mother used the chest, made of cedar, to store blankets and linens in her bedroom. I inherited it when she died two years ago. People have told me that it was a hope chest. What was a hope chest and what was it used for?

ANSWER:  “A rose by any other name....” so go the words of William Shakespeare. The same can be said of the “hope” chest. Originally referred to as a dowry chest, cedar chest, or trousseau chest, it changed names with the times. The dowry chest was meant to contain assets–money and jewelry—that the family of the bride gave to the groom in exchange for their daughter’s hand in marriage. But hope chest implies something else—the hope for a good life for her in marriage.

Young unmarried women used a hope chest to collect and store items, such as clothing and household linen, in preparation for married life. Americans called this a "hope chest" or "cedar chest" while the British referred to it as a "bottom drawer." 

Using her own needlework skills to construct a trousseau was for a young girl the equivalent of planning and saving for marriage by her future husband. The collection of a trousseau was a common coming-of-age rite until the 1950s, a step on the road to marriage between courting a man and engagement. Such a chest was an acceptable gift for a girl approaching a marriageable age.

What did a young girl put in her hope chest? Typically, she stored traditional dowry items, such as special dresses, table linens, towels, bed linens, quilts, silverware, and sometimes  kitchen items. As a bride would normally leave home when she married, cabinetmakers often made hope chests to be portable by including sturdy handles on either side. 

Traditionally, a mother would pass her hope chest down to her daughter. She would start preparing a hope chest from the time her daughter was a young age and slowly build the collection as the years went by. The chests contained many things thought of as “essentials,” such as china, silverware, linens, clothing, and jewelry, that a young woman would need to start a new life in marriage.

It was also standard practice to include family heirlooms and mementos. Things like albums or photographs, letters or treasured objects passed down through the generations that may not have much monetary or practical value but which would comfort the young woman in her new home.

The chest itself was often made of cedar. At that time, cedar was easily available and a popular choice for storage thanks to its naturally fresh, long-lasting fragrance, as well as natural resistance to mold and insects. Cedar also had a naturally warm color and a softer, cozier texture.

But hope chests didn’t just appear out of nowhere. Around 3,000 years ago, the ancient Egyptians created boxes and wooden chests with dovetail joints. The wealthier a girl was, the more ornately-decorated and -painted was her hope chest.

Between the 5th and 15th centuries, wooden chests saw a period of prosperity. In Europe, most were made of hardwoods like oak, poplar, walnut, pine woods and some soft woods. It was during this time that decorating a chest wasn’t just reserved for kings; it became common practice to add friezes and panels to the outer lid of a chest. Handles also began to appear, but not for decoration. During times of wars, battles and invasions, a household had to be ready to pack up their things and flee at a moment’s notice.

The 17th century witnessed a change in the hope chest—the addition of drawers. For the first time in history, cabinetmakers incorporated storage drawers into chest design. At first, it was simply the addition of two small drawers underneath the chest. By the end of the century, chest makers chose mahogany and employed inlay materials like pearl and bone. They also began to finish the chests with a coat of lacquer.

By the 19th century, the hope chest had evolved into a tradition in most families, especially among immigrants to America. This was typical among Scandinavian and German immigrants. The Amish have had a long traditions of plainly constructed chests with extensive painted decoration.

Today, the tradition of keeping a hope chest has faded away. One of the primary reasons is that such a chest tends to glorify the outdated idea of a “dowry.”  Also, it isn’t the most practical  since the items traditionally kept in a hope chest, like fancy linens and dresses, aren’t exactly the things a modern bride “needs” for a successful marriage. However, antique hope chests can be found in both antique shops and shows. And the more decoration one has, the higher the price.

To read more articles on antiques, please visit the Antiques Articles section of my Web site.  And to stay up to the minute on antiques and collectibles, please join the over 30,000 readers by following my free online magazine, #TheAntiquesAlmanac. Learn more about "folk art" in the 2023 Winter Edition, online now. And to read daily posts about unique objects from the past and their histories, like the #Antiques and More Collection on Facebook.

What Do Mason Jars Have to Do with the Erie Canal?

 

QUESTION: I’ve been collecting old mason jars for a while. Recently, I found a blue one at a flea market. Embossed on the front of it are the words “The Clyde.” The letters “CGW” appear on the bottom. I haven’t been able to find any information about this jar. Can you help me?

ANSWER: It appears that you found an old Mason jar made by the Clyde Glass Works of Clyde, New York, in 1895.

When New York Governor DeWitt Clinton proposed the Erie Canal that would cross the state, linking the Hudson River with the Great Lakes, people sarcastically called it "Clinton’s Big Ditch." A construction project of that magnitude, completed entirely by hand labor, seemed impossible. But by July 4, 1817, construction of the canal had begun. It wasn’t until October 26, 1825 that a canal boat made the first full-length voyage on the new canal.

Frederick Augustus Dezeng, an immigrant from Saxony, Germany, who operated a window glass factory near Geneva, New York, was a good friend of Governor Clinton. He understood the importance of being able to transport goods by water from Lake Erie all the way to New York City via the Hudson River. But more importantly, he realized that shipping his glass by canal boat would be safer and cause less breakage. Even carefully packed, glass didn’t  travel well in horse-drawn carts over bumpy dirt roads of unpredictable condition.

 saw the potential of doing business via the Erie Canal. Access to firewood to fuel the glass furnaces was a major reason, as was the ease of packet boats bringing in sand from Oneida, New York, along with quantities of potash lime via the Canal. He encouraged his  youngest of five children, William, to set up a glassworks along the Canal in nearby Laurelville, which later changed its name to Clyde.

William S. Dezeng and his brother-in-law, James R. Rees, went into partnership to open a glass factory to make cylinder window glass in 1827. They laid the cornerstone for their new enterprise on March 27, 1828, and the factory began production that year. A newspaper advertisement from 1833 promoted the firm’s glass as  first quality and free from imperfections. This was a major achievement in itself since up to that time window glass had many imperfections. In the process, a glassblower blew molten glass into a cylinder, then cut it it open and annealed it to flatten it out. However, ripples and small bubbles in the finished glass were almost unavoidable.

Orrin Southwick and Almon Wood, calling their glass business Southwick & Wood, built the first bottle factory in Clyde in 1864. Wood apparently withdrew to be replaced by Charles W. Reed to form the firm of Southwick & Reed—sometime between 1864 and 1868.

About 1868, Southwick, Reed & Company merged the bottle and window glass plants into a single unit. Unfortunately, the factory burned on July 24, 1873, but they rebuilt it  immediately.

Sometime during the following year, Clyde gained a license from the Consolidated Fruit Jar Company to produce Mason Patent jars. Since there were many fruit jars bearing the “CFJCo” monogram, their jars had “CLYDE, N.Y.” embossed on either the front or the back of each jar. When Consolidated apparently sold its fruit-jar interests to Hero around 1882, Clyde lost a major portion of its business.

In 1880, the owners of Southwick, Reed & Company incorporated as the Clyde Glass Works. By this time, Clyde was making soda and beer bottles, liquor flasks, and fruit jars, commonly referred to as Mason jars, marked with one of the Clyde logos. They produced quart jars in amber, aqua, cobalt blue, and clear glass but only made pint size jars in aqua.

Between 1868 and 1895, the Clyde Glass Works produced five different Mason jars—The Clyde, written in cursive, the CLYDE LIGHTNING and the CLYDE MASON’S IMPROVED, both embossed in all uppercase letters and made for the Consolidated Fruit Jar Company.

The Mason jar first appeared in the 1850s when John Landis Mason, a tinsmith from Vineland, New Jersey, was searching for a way to improve the relatively new process of home canning. Until then, home canning involved using wax to create an airtight seal above food. Users stopped the jars with corks, sealed them with wax, then boiled them. It was messy process and hardly foolproof.

In 1857, a 26-year-old Mason invented and patented threaded screw-top jars. The earliest Mason jars were made from transparent aqua glass. But Mason didn’t patent the rest of his invention—the rubber ring on the underside of the flat metal lids that created the airtight seal, which made wax unnecessary. By 1868, many glass companies were producing Mason jars. Including Southwick, Reed and Company. Though Mason tried to regain control of his invention after various court cases and failed business partnerships, he gave up.

Clyde Glass Works produced a clear Mason jar embossed with “The Clyde” in upwardly slanted cursive letters from 1895 to 1915. It was handmade with an old-style Lightning closure. Those jars with ground lips had narrow mouths while those with smooth lips had a regular size mouth. 

The firm first made these jars in 1895 to commemorate its incorporation as the Clyde Glass Works. By 1903, it had purchased new machines for making fruit jars but only used them to make jars until sometime during the following year. 

A jar, embossed with “CLYDE / LIGHTNING” on the side was a blown jar of green glass with a ground rim and sealed with an old-style Lightning closure. The "Lightning" toggle or swing-type closure had widespread use on a lot of different bottle types, though its primary use was on bottles for carbonated beverages, such as soda and beer, and canning jars. However, the sealing surface for these two main types of Lightning-type closures was different. Charles de Quillfeldt of New York City invented and patented this type of bottle or jar closure on January 5, 1875.  He originally intended his design to be used on beverage bottles but later altered it to use on canning or Mason jars.

Variations of the Mason jar include the "Improved Mason" which sealed on a shoulder above the thread instead of below. The Clyde Glass Works produced the Clyde Mason’s Improved jar by hand and embossed “CLYDE,” “IMPROVED,” “MASON” in three separate lines.

Out of 59 bottles identified as being made by Clyde, fifty-one were in the arched format—the arch and inverted arch. 

The glass works at Clyde, New York, had a long and varied history. Although it’s almost certain that Clyde never marked the majority of its containers, certain types of both bottles and jars were clearly identified as being produced at the plant. The earliest of these were jars, the Mason’s Improved jars with “S&W” and “SW&Co” embossed on the bottom edge came from the Southwick & Reed and Southwick, Reed & Company factories, respectively. These were almost certainly the earliest marked jars, made from 1864 to 1870. 

From 1870 to 1882, the factory made the Mason’s Patent and Mason’s Improved jars, embossed with the CFJCo monogram on the front and “CLYDE, N.Y.” on the reverse. Jars made between 1882 and 1890 didn’t have Clyde logos on them. The plant made The Clyde from 1890 to 1910, and produced the Clyde Mason’s Improved jar from 1895 to 1915. Lackluster sales forced the Clyde Glass Works to close in 1915.

The age, rarity, color, and condition of an antique Mason jar greatly influence its value.  A jar's age and rarity can be determined by the color, shape, mold and production marks of the glass, and the jar's closure. Mason jars usually have a proprietary brand embossed on the jar. Early jars embossed with "Mason's Patent November 28th 1858" that date from the late 1850s to early 1860s closely match the illustrations of Mason's 1858 patents. While the Clyde Glass Works’ Mason jars sell online for anywhere from $15 to $75, those embossed with the words “The Clyde” usually sell for higher prices.

To read more articles on antiques, please visit the Antiques Articles section of my Web site.  And to stay up to the minute on antiques and collectibles, please join the over 30,000 readers by following my free online magazine, #TheAntiquesAlmanac. Learn more about "folk art" in the 2023 Winter Edition, online now. And to read daily posts about unique objects from the past and their histories, like the #Antiques and More Collection on Facebook.

Dreaming of Spring

 

QUESTION: I’ve always enjoyed gardening. I guess I inherited that gene from my father. Every year, he would wait impatiently for the first of the season seed catalogs to arrive. As a kid, I loved paging through them to see the lavish illustrations of all kinds of flowers and vegetables. As I got older, I began helping my father choose the seeds to plant for the summer growing season. Now as an adult with my own family, I’m carrying on the tradition with my own children and garden in our backyard. I never considered collecting seed catalogs until after my father died, and I helped my mother sort through lots of old things. I came across some of dad’s old seed catalogs and brought them home with me. But honestly, I have no idea which of them is collectible. Can you offer some history of seed catalogs and which ones might be the best to collect?

ANSWER: Seed catalogs are the botanical equivalent of a dream book—a grower’s wish list. The most interesting, quirky, art-filled seed catalogs are from the early 1900s.

The hand-drawn and painted, romanticized illustrations and resplendent plant descriptions made them equal parts information and entertainment while offering gardeners plants for their upcoming summer season.

The first known garden catalog appeared over 400 years ago at the 1612 Frankfurt Fair with the distribution of the bulb catalog, Florilegium Amplissimum et Selectissimum, by Dutch grower Emmanual Sweerts. The catalog contained 560 hand-tinted images of flowering bulbs, giving gardeners a glimpse of possibilities for their own gardens.

Many of the illustrations originated in botanical publications, useful for identifying plants and noting their medicinal uses, but this new publication distributed to fair-goers was a first to present bulbs for sale. Sweerts died in 1612—the same year the catalog first appeared in print—but it was reprinted for many years to come, right into the Tulipmania period in Dutch history.

Long before the soil warms, the first weeds sprout, and good intentions give way to busy summers, these gems tempt gardeners with visions of  ‘candy-sweet’ corn, crunchy cucumbers, and perfectly plump tomatoes.

It seems that gardening enthusiasts have been drooling over seed catalogs for a long time. Prior to his publication, other plant catalogs listed ornamental species growing in the private gardens of the rich and famous.

Wealthy Europeans had a penchant for collecting ornamental and newly discovered plant species from around the world. Printed catalogs with beautiful engravings depicting these rare botanical possessions helped them show off their status.

A few years after that Dutch catalog, René Morin published the first known French plant catalog in Paris.

Seed catalogs not only provide a bright spot in winter for the gardener, but they also offer a colorful glimpse into the past.

Seed catalogs continue to hold a colorful and important pride of place in history, and not just gardening history. These publications offered gardeners an interesting and informative glimpse into the past, so much so that the Smithsonian Institute Libraries contains a collection of about 10,000 seed catalogs dating from 1830 to the present day. The pages of these catalogs reveal not only details about the history of gardening in the U.S., but their text and illustrations also provide a fascinating look at printing, advertising and fashion trends through the years.

The honor of publishing the first American seed catalog goes to 18th century horticulturist David Landreth. The D. Landreth Seed Company, founded in 1784 in Philadelphia, introduced the zinnia, the white potato, various tomatoes, and Bloomsdale spinach to America, largely through its catalogs.

As American pioneers moved westward, ordering seed catalogs became an important way to bring fruits, vegetables and flowers with them to their new homes. When the nation's railway system grew and the mail service improved, the seed and nursery trade expanded as well.

After the Civil War, the mail order seed market became quite competitive, and nurseries used their catalogs to announce novelty items such as "Mammoth," "Giant" or "Perfection" varieties of flowers, fruits and vegetables.

Catalog covers became more elaborate, and catalogs contained more than basic information and began to include more detailed descriptions, testimonials, special offers, contests and awards the nursery’s plants had won at horticultural fairs or exhibitions. For example, Dingee & Conard's 1889 catalog contained a special insert on pink paper that gave a detailed listing of its discounted collection of popular varieties.

Boston's Joseph Breck & Company, established in 1818, published its first seed catalog in 1840. Called "The New England Agricultural Warehouse and Seed Store Catalogue," the 84-page publication included illustrations and horticultural details next to product listings. Today the company is called Breck's Bulbs, and it still mails free catalogs to customers.

Seed catalogs have reflected the times. For example, catalogs from 1945 celebrated the end of the World War II with colorful pictures and the advice to settle down and to decorate your home with flowers. Seed producers gave flower varieties victory-related names. The back cover of the Jackson & Perkins catalog in 1945 featured the 'Purple Heart' viola, for instance. In one patriotic display, the 1945 Burpee Seeds catalog depicted a V-For-Victory- shaped red Swiss chard plant surrounded by bomb-like carrots over a tomato shaped like a globe.

The beauty of seed catalogs comes from their photography and, in earlier examples some cases, their engraving. Even today, companies such as Territorial Seed Company, based in Cottage Grove, Oregon.

One of the most well known seed catalogs belongs to W. Atlee Burpee & Company,  founded in 1876 by Washington Atlee Burpee in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, after starting a mail-order chicken business in 1876. The company expanded to selling garden seeds, farm supplies, tools and hogs after customers began asking for seeds they had grown in their native farms. 

In 1888, Burpee established the family farm, Fordhook Farm in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, as a family farm and the first experimental test field station in the United States. After he traveled to Europe to collect seeds which needed to be adapted to North American climates, Burpee conducted crop field trials.

In 1900, distant cousin Luther Burbank visited the farm inspiring him to create his own experiments. He later created additional research stations, including in California in 1909, to test seeds. By the turn of the century, Burpee's had created one of the largest mail and freight businesses of the time.

By 1915 Burpee was mailing over a million catalogs a year to American gardeners. But that same year, its direction began to change when Atlee’s son, David, inherited the company upon the death of his father. David’s main interest lay in victory gardens, and he became an early promoter of them during World War I. He also prioritized the company’s output in flower seeds and initiated several flower hybridization breeding programs. Burpee geneticists also began to modify the genes of seeds using x-rays and colchicine.

The advertisements began to include full-color advertising to include Burpee's strengths of reliability of seeds using the motto "Burpee's Seeds Grow" and leader in the industry while the catalog was compact, arranged by category, and easy to find the order form.

To read more articles on antiques, please visit the Antiques Articles section of my Web site.  And to stay up to the minute on antiques and collectibles, please join the over 30,000 readers by following my free online magazine, #TheAntiquesAlmanac. Learn more about "folk art" in the 2023 Winter Edition, online now. And to read daily posts about unique objects from the past and their histories, like the #Antiques and More Collection on Facebook.