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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Baking Powder Billheads

In 1843 the first modern version of baking powder was discovered and manufactured by Alfred Bird, a British chemist. In 1846, Justus Von Liebig in Germany experiments with yeast made from sodium bicarbonate and hydrochloric acid with explosive results. In 1885, Eben Horsford and George Wilson manufacture chemicals which eventually became the Rumford Chemical Works. Horsford formulated and patented Rumford Baking Powder, the first calcium phopshate baking powder. In 1889, William Wright and chemist George Rew developed a double-action baking powder marketed under the name Calumet Baking Powder. Below find some examples of baking powder billheads.

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THE EPHEMERA OF BUSINESS

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