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Albany Bicentennial Tablet No. 1: Fort Orange
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Our last entry talked about the Albany Bicentennial celebration and the fate of a marker meant to commemorate the Black citizens of Albany that may never have gotten to its intended location in Washington Park. Now let’s talk about the bicentennial markers that did make it to their intended locations (mostly). We know what…
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Dr. Jones’ Beaver Oil: No Beaver, No Dr. Jones
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In talking about Lebbeus Burton of Troy, the druggist whose fortune founded an orphans’ home that is still in use today, we touched on the seemingly unlikely cure of Dr. Jones’ Beaver Oil (also sold as Beaver And Oil Compound, “for the treatment of Rheumatism, Neuralgia, Sore Throat and Quinsy, Headache, Toothache, Backache, Bruises.”…
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Beaver Oil, Root Beer, and Orphans
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Looking up these old local stories is nearly always a venture down a rabbit hole, and it’s usually a question of where to stop. One little detail catches the eye, and I start to find out more about that, and it leads to another detail, which leads to a huge revelation, which leads to…
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Wolf Hollow
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Another of the historical markers placed in Glenville in 1935 through the efforts of Percy Van Epps, town and county historian for something like 25 years. This one was for Wolf Hollow, “A rent and displacement of 1,000 feet in earth’s surface rocks. Here in 1669 the Mohawks ambushed their Algonquin invaders.” As we…
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Troy-built Starbucks
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I suspect that, armed with a little bit of information, one could find bits of Troy’s manufacturing history in every state of the union. Here from the Library of Congress is a view of the base of a cast iron tower on the Bidwell Bar Suspension Bridge & Stone Toll House, near Lake Oroville…
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Wallace Armer, again
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Back when I put up the Wallace Armer receipt, I forgot to show you the back. It was from the brief glory days of the square serif.
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Freihofer’s
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Everyone in the Capital District remembers Freihofer’s. In my mother’s day and before, they were the major home-delivery bakery. You put the Freihofer’s sign in your front window and the truck (and before that, the horse-drawn wagon) would stop and bring fresh bread, cookies and cakes right to your door. Even when I was…
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The Silver Wrinkle is our finest receptacle
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The contract (or, in its own parlance, “approval memorandum”) for my great grandmother’s casket, presumably supplied by the Mancini Funeral Home in Amsterdam. Mancini wasn’t big on branding his correspondence, apparently. The woman buried in it is something of a mystery to us, even though she was my mother’s grandmother and alive and living…
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Informal funeral home is informal.
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A couple of weeks ago we looked at the lovely and highly detailed receipt for my great grandfather’s funeral, from Schenectady’s Baxter Funeral Home. In that same year, in a different line of the family, my great grandmother died. As seen here, the Mancini Funeral Home (presumably in Amsterdam, though I didn’t look it…