I’m
not sure what attracted me to this envelope when I first saw it. I’ve always liked turkeys, the quintessentially
Native American poultry, images of which have graced many a Thanksgiving card and
second grade report on the Pilgrims. But
the image of a turkey in a truly comical setting, walking down an avenue of
cigars and carrying a flag is so contrary to the sober, devout images seen in
November that I smiled at an advertisement 100+ years old.
There
are three elements to my cigar-selling turkey:
the sender, the receiver, and the product advertised. Let’s look at each item.
The Sender
Church
and McConnell was a wholesale grocery in Toledo. Two men, William Church and John McConnell
had established the company around 1900.
Church had been a traveling salesman for the older and larger Berdan
& Company wholesalers in 1896, and he and McConnell may have gone into
business for themselves based on that experience.
The Receiver
A
wholesale grocer supplies merchandise to smaller, retail grocers. In the days before automobiles and long-haul
truckers, every crossroads village and urban neighborhood had one or more
retail grocers. In Burgoon, Ohio, that
was Henry F. Bischoff.
Bischoff
was born in 1848 in New York City,
but moved to Sandusky County, Ohio,
as a child. He grew up in Fremont,
and served in the 72nd Ohio
in the Civil War. During the war, he was
captured by Confederate forces in Mississippi
and was a prisoner at the notorious Andersonville Prison in Georgia
for almost a year. After the war he
moved to Burgoon in southern Sandusky
County, where he opened a general
store.
Henry
Bischoff was a grocer in Burgoon for the rest of his life. He was a “solid citizen,” a member of the Odd
Fellows, the GAR, and the school board.
He served as postmaster of Burgoon from 1885 to 1913. And, apparently,
stocked a line of cigars in his store named after a fellow Union veteran named
Charles Denby.
The Merchandise
Charles
Denby (1830-1906) was a native of Evansville, Indiana. During the war he served in the 42nd
Indiana, was promoted to Colonel,
and injured at the battle of Perryville, Kentucky. After the war he practiced law and in 1885
was appointed United States Ambassador to China. He served in China
through three presidential administrations, retiring in 1897. Denby also served in the Philippines
and did diplomatic work in Japan. The Emperors of China
and of Japan
gave him medals. In retirement he was an
active public speaker and member of the GAR.
In
1898, the president of the Fendrich Cigar Company approached Denby about naming
a line of cigars after him. Denby and
John Fendrich were friends, but the ambassador did not believe “Denby Cigars”
would sell well or last very long. He
was wrong; “Charles
Denby Invincibles” can still be purchased in well-stocked cigar stores.
Three
parts – do they add up to a whole? Why a
line of cigars, illustrated by a strutting turkey, was named for a former
ambassador to China and sold by a Toledo wholesaler to a tiny
village storekeeper in a town with the unlikely name of Burgoon? That I can’t answer. But it is an odd, and
oddly funny, situation, odd as the turkey which is still walking his
cigar-lined street after one hundred years.
[Sources include James R. Miller, “Philatelic Genealogy: Ohio at
Work,” Ohio Genealogical Society
Quarterly, Vol. 52, Summer 2012: 93-97, and http://www.broadleafcigars.com/charles.htm]
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