THE EPHEMERA OF BUSINESS

I recently read an article on the seed industry on the New York Times website about rising seed costs . So, I thought I would show some seed billheads today. My favorite is the Jerome Rice billhead with the comical graphic showing the farmer trying to lift a giant cabbage.

Hope you enjoyed these billheads while you ring in the new year!

The flouring industry is the first manufacture recorded in American annals. The first wheat was brought to this country by Bartholomew Gosnold, and landed at an island in Buzzard's Bay in 1602. The first flour-mill mentioned in American history was the hand-mill, which consisted of two small millstones, one having a handle, rubbed upon the other. Perhaps the most celebrated flouring-mills in the period immediately after the Revolution were those of Delaware, on the Brandywine. Up to 1785 the different milling processes were separate and largely done by hand; but Evans, by the introduction of the elevator, conveyer, and other mechanisms, combined the different steps into a continuous system, dispensing with one half of the labor formerly required, and enabling the miller by machinery alone to take the grain through " from wagon to wagon again." As the country grew westward, so went the wheat and flour industries. Soon, one state stood out in the production of flour and tha...

Besides having highly decoative billheads, many companies also carried this over into the receipts for collection. These receipts are smaller than billheads are are normally printed lenghtwise. Think of a piece of letterhead but have the size. Many of these were pre-printed with blanks to fill in the amounts owed.

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...