Tebbets or Tibbets

I recently purchased some billheads New Hampshire. The billheads trade between firm spellings of Tibbets and Tebbets. Both have the same address No. 20 Market Street. Both have simple signboard advertisement on the left hand side with slightly different product listings. The Tebbets is dated 1876 and the Tibbets is dated 1875.

In a Manchester New Hampshire directory dated 1882 is shows a Tebbets Brothers in Rochester, an E.A. Tibbets & Son in Great Falls/Somersworth (more on New Hampshire’s crazy confusing double town names and the difficulty it creates in researching old businesses in another soon to be post). Even a Genealogical and Family History of the State of New Hampshire interchanges the spellings of the surname. An Ebenezer Armstrong (E.A.) Tebbets is listed as a merchant. His son William Tibbets is listed as being a clerk in the firm of Tibbets & Brother at Somersworth, then he became a partner in his father’s firm under the name E.A. Tibbets & Son. So, the firms are one in the same, must have been a printer error and the firm decided to use the billheads regardless of the error, or perhaps the family interchanged the spellings themselves and it made no difference to them.

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Australian Billheads

As promised from by last post, here are some examples of Australian billheads I found on the website Print and Printmaking Australia Asia Pacific . Based on the Australian print collection at the National Gallery of Australia there is free online access to over 22,000 images. The databases can be searched by artist, subject or print techniques such as etching, woodcut, wood-engraving, linocut, lithograph, screenprint, monotype and other print related processes such as posters and artists books. Index to online information on printmakers, print workshops, print publishers, print galleries and public and private collections.

CAPEWELL HORSE NAIL COMPANY

I regularly purchase goods and paper at a local online auction. In December, I noticed that a lot of random estate / household goods also had a small pile of what looked to be calendars. I won the lot and sure enough it included many advertising calendars. Many of those were for the Capewell Horse Nail Company of Hartford Connecticut. These calendars were damaged, but the color and graphics were still very bright. Last week, I happened on a lot of paper through ebay that included a billhead for the company. Attached are photos of all for your enjoyment.

Rubber Goods

The rubber industry in the United States can hardly be said to have had any real and tangible existence until the discovery of the process of vulcanization in 1844 by Charles Goodyear. The first rubber ever imported into this country was brought into Boston in the year 1800 and came in In that same year a patent was granted to one Jacob Hummel, of Philadelphia, for a gum-elastic varnish; of which, however, there seems to have been no further mention. Some ten years later, in 1823, a Boston sea-captain, coming from South American ports, brought with him a pair of gilded rubber shoes which excited the greatest interest. Two years later, 500 pairs of rubber shoes, made by the natives along the Amazon, were brought into Boston, this time without the fantastical refinement of gilding. They were exceedingly thick, clumsy, and unshapely shoes, and yet they sold readily, bringing from $3 to $5 per pair as they were found that they were a secure protection against dampness. This was the e...

THE EPHEMERA OF BUSINESS

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