Popular Culture Series: Arbuckle Coffee Trade Cards: Alabama

My daughter keeps telling me that we live in a museum that begs to be shared. We already have a family tradition of displaying old postcards around the house during holidays that, on her suggestion, OTR has extended to readers. She was looking through a box of Arbuckle Coffee trade cards last month and suggested I do a series with them. The first day of the month is an ideal starting date.

Advertising and trade cards became became very popular in the second half of the 19th century. They have been used to promote just about every product since and remain a popular pastime across the generations. As a form of advertising and promotion, the Arbuckle Coffee Company began producing cards in a series to encourage the collection of sets of cards. Their original State and Territory Map Series issue began in 1889 and ran until 1916. Each card had an attractive map and illustration on one side with an advertisement and series description on the reverse. Today, the cards are a colorful window into our past.

In 1959, I found many of these cards impaled on a long, thin nail on the wall next to an ancient kitchen range in my great aunt's home. No doubt they had been there for half a century or more. Imagine that.