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Beck’s Pocket Guide of Troy
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“Beck’s Pocket Guides are distributed each year to every Policeman and Fireman in the city, all offices in the Court House, City Hall, Jail, Troopers, Post Office Employees, Bus Drivers, Aldermen, Supervisors, Bank Employees, School Teachers and Business Houses in the City.” In 1935, Fred A. Beck’s Pocket Guide of Troy, N.Y. had grown…
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O Oysters, come and walk with us!
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Sometime in the late 1950s, for a very brief time, my grandfather ran a drive-in restaurant on Aqueduct Road in Schenectady, not far from the Aqueduct (Route 146) bridge, and now the site of an auto junkyard. A lot of his receipts from that business were saved. In this age when everything is computer-inventoried…
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Francis Calo begs leave to inform you
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In case you wondered, Schenectady residents of 1862, yes, Francis Calo is still running a baggage wagon to every part of the city. And he continues the business of carman (which under one definition would be the same as running a baggage wagon). And he hangs out across the street from Lyon’s. (Imagine a…
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The most popular flour merchant in the world
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In only 150 years, we have completely forgotten the most popular flour merchant in the world. That this may have been an exaggeration I cannot accept.
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Daguerrotype or Ambrotype? So hard to choose…
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In 1862, S.J.Thompson & Co. was making photographs, daguerreotypes, and ambrotypes at 478 Broadway, in a now-lost building somewhere on the north side between State Street and Maiden Lane. Daguerrotype was the first commercial photographic process. Ambrotype was a positive image on glass, using a collodion solution (and such collodion, it is said, played…
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Ticonderoga
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In case anyone needs more (and you know you do) on the relationship between Ticonderoga and the pencil that bears its name, here’s a little note from “Graphite,” a publication promoting the billions of wonders produced by the Joseph Dixon Crucible Company of Jersey City, New Jersey. In case you wondered where to get plumbago…
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The Pencil Lead Wars of 1862
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I could put in a phenomenal amount of effort to explain what was going on in the northern New York graphite mines, what sort of a stranglehold Joseph Dixon & Co. was holding over its competitors, and how he who controlled pencil leads held the fate of a free press in his hands. Or…
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All Hoxsie, all the time
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While I’m on this here Hoxsie kick, I might as well mention a little bit more about George Hoxsie, the Albanian with the audacity to think that his name alone was enough to sell mineral water (or perhaps sarsparilla) (or perhaps something else) to Schenectadians. In 1870, shortly after the rooster crowed, George Hoxsie…
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