Tag: Capital District local history Albany Schenectady Troy

  • Wallace Armer, again

    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.

  • Freihofer’s

    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…

  • The Silver Wrinkle is our finest receptacle

    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…

  • Informal funeral home is informal.

    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…

  • Albany, City of the Bald?

    If you believe what Professor Henry A. DeMunn had to say in 1862 (and I demand to know the provenance of his doctoral degree), that he had been working for a year and a half with the worst cases of baldness to be found “in this or any other country,” then you have to…