The Slower Road

Here’s our first guest post from Mindy, the librarian for the CMA …

.

I’m always excited when someone asks me a research question that takes me deep into the archives. I love any excuse to spend a few hours carefully turning the pages of The Hub and The Carriage Monthly. The articles are gold mines of information, and I never fail to learn something new. But the pages before and after the articles might be my favorite part. I love looking at old advertisements – reading the claims made by competing companies, questioning the way they boast, finding accessories I’ve never seen before and wondering exactly how they work. These ads can often teach us a lot.

Sometimes the advertisements just make me smile. Like this one, for the varnish maker Valentine & Company. Check out this form of “Rapid Transit” envisioned for 1900 – an “aerial dog cart” …

.

.

Valentine & Company was a frequent advertiser in The Hub. This particular ad was published on September 1, 1877 (Vol. 19, No. 6). Looking through Valentine advertisements and catalogs, I’ve noticed that carriage word-play was a common theme throughout their marketing materials. We’ll be sharing more of their entertaining prints in future posts!

Stimson & Valentine was formed in 1832 as a merger of a paint dealership and a commercial varnish producer. Around 1860, Valentine brothers Lawson and Henry became sole partners in the business and renamed it Valentine & Company. They soon made the decision to hire a chemist, Charles Homer, who worked to perfect their product.

Valentine & Company relocated to New York City in 1870, and began specializing in varnishes for vehicle finishing. By the turn of the century, Valentine & Company had branch offices throughout the country, and had won dozens of international medals for its high-quality varnish.

L. Valentine Pulsifer joined the company in 1903, putting his Harvard University chemistry degree to work. In 1907, Pulsifer produced a new product called Valspar, the first clear varnish. In 1932, Valentine & Company began to operate as a subsidiary of the newly formed Valspar Corporation, which is still in business today. 

I’ll have to admit that I’d never heard of London’s Wellcome Library until this morning, when the announcement came via Twitter that the library was making more than 100,000 images available as high-resolution downloads. These represent hundreds of years of, as they say, “visual culture,” now available free of charge.

Many of the images focus on medical and scientific subjects, but I of course had to do a search for horse-drawn vehicles anyway. What the heck, right?

And I found this undated and un-captioned, but undeniably lovely, image …

.

.