Another elegant billhead from The Biggert Collection. This sample from 1930 is from the DeGolyer Varnish Works, manufacturers of varnishes, japans, shellacs, &c. Apparently a G.W. Peters was in need of two gallons of E-kon-o-me Remover, which ran him a neat $3.60 plus parcel post. According to the billhead, the company was established in 1840, and had its office and factory at 77-79 13th St. in Troy. That would be just east of RPI’s current campus. That’s now a residential street but there was historically manufacturing mixed in in that area up the Congress Street hill.
I don’t find much information about DeGolyer, other than a 1923 Federal Trade Commission complaint that the company was selling shellac that was less than pure excretions of the lac beetle without saying so. Arthur Weise in his “City of Troy and Its Vicinity” listed brothers Joseph and Watts DeGolyer as a varnish manufacturer at 113 Sixth St., and mentions that Joseph served on the building committee for the Troy Railroad Young Men’s Christian Association in 1882.
I love that companies used to be named very simply — there was a family name, perhaps, and a product. Thus, “DeGolyer Varnish Works.” Today the marketers would consider that too old-fashioned, too limiting, too much of an association with varnish and some people don’t like varnish so shouldn’t we call it DeVarnCo?