By Roberta McKern
For The New Era
The East Linn Museum is still closed and our ability to visit three-dimensional objects from the
past is a little limited, although we can skulk around the yard and see a variety of farming and
logging artifacts displayed on the grounds and in the sheds.
Of interest are a chainsaw-carved sculpture of two loggers under a roof who are cutting a length of Douglas Fir with a crosscut saw while balancing on springboards – the way logging was once done.
Another visible artifact stands in a fenced and roofed enclosure: the Denby truck, an early vehicle also used in logging.
People going into the museum often miss the doorless truck. Doorless, we have been assured,
so the driver had a chance to leap to safety should its brakes fail on the downhill grade.
Because we cannot go into the museum, we can look at artifacts in a two-dimensional way
using a reproduced 1897 Sears Roebuck catalog put out by Skyhorse Publishing Company, with
a forward by Nick Lyons in 2007 and 2018.
This particular catalog came from a modern-day facsimile of Sears Roebuck and Company, the multifaceted mail-order business called Amazon, straight to our front door.
So, what does this old catalog mean to us? Why do we want to look at it?
It is a sealed time capsule. It can show us objects from before 1897, but that date is final. And it acts as a map of history because of the hundreds of objects depicted in engraved illustrations, making it full of social history and a cornucopia of human ingenuity with a staggering quantity of objects.
Just as the internet has encouraged the growth of Amazon today, the completion of the interstate railroads, particularly those joining the East Coast to the West in 1869, spurred the growth of the catalog stores like Sears Roebuck and Montgomery Ward.
Obviously, old catalogs act to help us understand the past according to what was included.
Sears claimed to offer what was wanted at a cost calculated to be lower than other merchants.
In fact, the company offered to supply local shopkeepers at agreeable rates.
As Sears repeated over and over, its ambition was to sell at an agreeable cost and if an order did not fit requirements, they felt compelled to say so.
Now we tend to be a little snide about the future uses of Sears catalogs as décor and otherwise,
in two-holed establishments on hillsides with judicious modesty covers and a view through an
open door of the apple orchard where deer sometimes could be spied.
We have even had a lesson on how to properly crumple catalog pages for comfort when substituted for tissue paper (which could be ordered from Sears, 100 rolls at a time for $2.25).
However, looking through the 1897 book, we can begin to realize how wrong we may have
been in writing of the past. Life was more complicated.
By 1897, the U.S. was on an industrial roll and the catalogs show this.
Households from Seattle, Wash., to Orlando, Fla., could share delicacies like dining on northeastern blackberries ordered from the grocery pages and served from pressed glass fruit bowls to those seated at Sears dining room suites.
Thus, for people settled in remote areas, a touch of class could intervene.
The majority of the population still lived rural lives, but urbanization encroached and those from
small towns could find a touch of elitism by ordering jeweled ear bobs or pistols or buggy whips
from the pages of Sears.
The 1897 book offers 33 departments. We can imagine the children of a family seated
near a window on a winter’s day leafing through a catalog to improve their reading skills and to
scrutinize exotic wares such as nutmeg and nutmeg graters.
The catalog did not aim at children and did not include toys at that time.
Yes, the catalog featured a nutmeg grater.
A pair of museum volunteers once found a strange little mechanical contraption that turned out,
unexpectedly, to be a nutmeg grater. We never quite figured out how it worked, and no, it
was not like a simple miniature cheese grater.
The 1897 catalog has one but does not really explain it either.
It is a minor lesson, but the catalog reminds us how cooks once had to grate nutmeg, seed
raisins, and beat lumps of sugar with hammers to get a wine glass- or a cupful. With butter
coming as pieces as big as a walnut or a small egg, cooking was not precise.
We see a selection of cookbooks in the 1897 catalog, including “The White House Cookbook” and “The Buckeye Cookbook.” They are among “Household and Medical Works.”
Should dinners not agree, the preparer could turn to “Robb’s Family Physician” for a remedy.
To encourage literacy, the book section offered book titles and authors’ names that those of us
who are older can recall from a Saturday or Wednesday afternoon in a small-town library where
books had accumulated for decades.
If we are surprised, it’s because of our own tendency to overlook what was available in the 19th century. Authors included Aesop, Mark Twain, James Fenimore Cooper, and Washington Irving.
Girls had Louisa Mae Alcott books to choose from, like “Little Women,” and boys could follow Horatio Alger’s directions for achieving success.
And there is, too, the offer of Encyclopedia Britannica for $19. (The museum has a
donated set. The reader must be very knowledgeable to approach the tomes, but they can be
kept for admiration.)
When we contemplate the innumerable goods available in 1897, we must really admit the
industrial revolution was rolling.
In three or less years, a new century would usher in utter changes. Soon, would come the Spanish-American war with the United States embroiled for the next 100-plus years in international politics, resulting in two world wars and a worldwide great depression.
The Alaskan Gold Rush would come and go, and the Panama Canal would unite the Atlantic Ocean with the Pacific.
Sears’ offers of horse tack and buggies were nearly a last gasp as automobiles began moving into the future.
An 1897-bathroom suite consisted of a large bowl and gallon-sized pitcher, a slop bucket, and a chamber mug, matching or not. In a few years, Sears would feature indoor plumbing. We can see that and maybe Sears did back then, but the inventory went according to popular demand and Saturday night baths still required large metal tubs.
Urbanization would soon bring an emphasis on indoor plumbing, but not yet.
In the chill or winter, perhaps it is too easy to leaf through an older mail order catalog from the
nineteenth century and feel akin to many of the objects depicted because we grew up in
basically what was rural America, and because we are writing about the East Linn Museum,
where many similar articles are collected.
But surely the story of mail order catalogs and the role they played in shaping American culture must be difficult to ignore, especially if we think of the construction of railroads
In Oregon, in 1897, terminals where Sears Roebuck would ship goods from Chicago included
Arlington, Baker City, LaGrande, Portland, Roseburg and Salem.
For us, an order reaching Salem could travel south on the Southern Pacific line to Halsey or be sent on the Albany Eastern to Brownsville.
Rural delivery made things easier. At any rate, arrangements would have to be made, but a buyer would feel it was worthwhile. The average freight rate for 100 pounds was $3.00, and Sears recommended people pool their orders to keep costs down.
Sears even had a discount rate on ordering books, allowing small towns and out-of-the-way places to build libraries at eight cents per volume or seven books for 50 cents.
So solicitous was the company of its customers and their needs, it seemed a shame to turn its offers down.
Still, if prices were low in 1897, when a cheap .22-caliber pistol sold for 68 cents and a buggy for $28.95, so were the wages of the hopeful leafing through the catalog.
A logger in a camp might get $30 per month and found (food and lodging), chewing tobacco included.
Women earned less and children even smaller amounts.
Yet, the 1897 Sears catalog shows a munificence of goods for those who could afford them and were capable of filling out the order forms which created an emporium fitting to the edge of the kitchen table.
Although the Sears Roebuck Company is turning into folklore regarding some of the ties
connecting us to the past, we can remain readers of the 1897 book to lead us back in time at
the East Linn Museum with curiosity and amusement.