Old Ornate Letterheads
There’s an old joke about using all the pig except the squeal. In this presentation we’re actually using the squeal—the letterhead, not the letter.
Time was when signs of progress were smokestacks belching great plumes of smoke and soot. Many companies had fine engravings of their facilities or products created for their stationery. Whether for a manufacturer, hotel or department store, these often displayed tall smokestacks, lots of dreamy clouds and shiny Hupmobiles navigating the wide avenues around the always ideally-rendered establishments.
Imagine you are Miss Una Edwards, working in the old mill office. The clatter and hum of the mill outside the open window is loud but mostly unnoticed. The overhead fans create a slight breeze that ruffles the correspondence on your desk.
Over the decades you open and pass on thousands of these letters to Mr. Charley and other mill officials. Do you, Miss Una, find the letterheads as interesting as we do, nearly a century later? Perhaps the great cities, immense buildings and inviting steamship lines they portray, take you—in your mind—far away from Cliffside.
Here are just a few of those letterheads, culled from hundreds of letters in our archives, addressed to the mill or the railroad, dating from 1917 to 1940.
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