THE EPHEMERA OF BUSINESS

I have had a hard time trying to come up with a title for these graphic billheads. All of them have a portrait of what we may assume, is/are the proprietor of the business. All of them men, of course, not that women owned businesses weren't out there.

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...

It is said that pork was cured and packed in barrels in Salem, Mass., in 1640, and it is certain that, about 1690, Boston did quite a trade in that line; but the paternity of the Western packing business belongs to Cincinnati. In 1818, Elisha Mills established as a packer in Cincinnati. The first drove of hogs ever received in Chicago was in 1827, but no attempt at packing seems to have been made until 1832. In that year George W. Dole packed some pork for Oliver Newbury, of Detroit; but Chicago does not figure in the statistics of packing points until 1850. The development of the agricultural resources of the Western States, especially from Ohio to the Mississippi and Missouri rivers, cheapened the cost of producing animals, particularly hogs; and attention to their production was stimulated and encouraged by the demands from Southern and Eastern dealers for product for their markets. Packing operations naturally followed in many places west of Cincinnati, more or less directly in com...