History Detectives Eat Your Heart Out

The other night while out on a family drive in a neighborhood slightly more upscale than our own humble street, we came upon a little pile of discarded things in front of a house. Our antique-loving eyes immediately honed in on the big old oak picture frame. We stopped the car and brought the treasure home.

It's a very nice antique oak frame, and although the picture it contained wasn't to our taste we decided to find out a little about it. After all, The old trash pictures we see people find on Antiques Roadshow are often valuable, and make me wish I studied art history. Upon removing the back we found a few pages of an old newspaper used as backing for the picture. The picture (a colonial scene of people drinking coffee) turned out to be an old advertisement for chocolate that someone had cut and fit into the frame...a sure sign of Yankee frugality. The newspaper, however, provided much entertainment. The pages are from the June 9, 1884 Whig and Courier from Bangor, Maine. The paper isn't in business anymore, perhaps because they kept throwing their weight behind the wrong presidential candidate. The lead story promotes James G. Blaine as the "next President of the United States." (Grover Cleveland would beat Blaine in the 1884 election, becoming the first democrat elected to the Presidency in 28 years.) There is also an interesting article, I'm not sure if it's a society article or a sports article, but it details a sculling (rowing) match between two gentlemen (or dandies, I'm not sure). Apparently one of the racers didn't show and there was a big hullabaloo. I won't spoil the story for you but will run it in its entirety in a later post.

But the real fun is in the advertisements. The majority of them are for medicinal items, although I have to wonder at the actual medicinal value of any of them. In fact, if you added the phrase "ask your doctor about..." to them and then a list of possible side effects most of the ads would be very familiar to most of the drug commercials that plague us today. Johnson's Anodyne Liniment, for example, promises to cure "influenza, bleeding at the lungs, hoarseness, hacking, cough, whooping cough, chronic diarrhea, cholera morbus, kidney troubles, and diseases of the spine." And that's with internal AND external application! Gray's Specific Medicine isn't very specific, as it promises an "unfailing cure for scminial weakness, impotency, and all diseases, as loss of memory, universal lassitude, pain in the back, dimness of vision, premature old age, and many other diseases that lead to insanity or consumption."

By the way, if you're looking for a good smoke you can get six havana cheroots for 25-cents at Tea White's. Also, if anyone wants to buy a used steamboat, lookup Dr. A. Walton, Bangor, ME.