Milk

My great grandfather William Theodore Grund, called Billy for all of his adult life, started working in 1893 at age 15, as a clerk according to the St. Louis Missouri city directory for that year. His eldest daughter, my grandmother Georgia (named, incidently, for his wife's father) claimed that he used the money earned from this first job to purchase a set of Staffordshire porcelain dishes for his mother Anna. The set originally, that I'm aware of, consisted of a 12-place setting of dinner plate, salad plate, soup bowl, dessert plate, tea/coffee cup and saucer plus 5 serving bowls, 2 serving platters, a vegetable server with lid, gravy boat, butter dish with lid, creamer and sugar (a total of 86 pieces). Not all the pieces have survived more than a hundred years of use, but the set is surprisingly intact considering. I inherited these dishes when my grandparents passed away, and I've always referred to them as my "blue dishes".

What amazes me about the art and science of genealogy research is that, with this little bit of information and the internet, I can reconstruct a whole story.

By 1893, a man by the name of Samuel Cupples and his partners had amassed 22 warehouses each built directly next to and over the railroad freight lines in the south of St. Louis. The station there was aptly called Cupples Station and the area around it Cupples Block. Shippers like the Scudder-Gale Grocer Company were able to warehouse their goods so efficiently that Cupples essentially had the monopoly on distribution for the entire city. The original warehouse buildings were demolished in the 1960s and Cupples Station is now the site of St. Louis Cardinal's Busch Stadium.

Billy was employed at the Scudder-Gale Grocer Company (EG Scudder, Pres; AH Gale, VP; Geo G Whitelaw, Sec; and WA Scudder, Treas) located at 714-724 Spruce street in the Cupples Block, likely from the beginning as an apprentice, and was by 1895 promoted to clerk The Scudder-Gale company had succeeded through merger in 1876 from the wholesale grocery house of General Grocer Company, owned and operated by Arthur H. Gale's father since 1838. It was then absorbed and reformed again in 1902.

By 1903, Billy was a partner in the Phillip C. Grund and Bro. Granitoid Paving and Concrete Work company. This would have put him at his brother's house on Virginia st. often, and it was there, literally across the backyard fence, that he met Julia Anna Jansen. My mother believes that Billy's parents had intended for him to marry a Bothmann cousin, a niece or great-niece of his mother's. But this chance meeting put an end to that speculation. Billy and Julia were married in April 1906.

Billy worked as a city buyer for the August Nasse Grocery Company from 1910 until he was brought, well qualified, into his father-in-law's business, the George R. Jansen Transfer Company. By 1918 he was a manager, and promoted to vice-president / treasurer by 1933. He was active and well-respected in the St. Louis Team and Truck Owner's Association for many, many years. Upon the death of his father-in-law in 1936, he assumed the presidency of the company and remained so until his death in 1952.

The china itself is marked Elysée Hanley England J&G Meakin. J&G Meakin was founded in Hanley, Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire, England in 1851. The particular marking dates production of the Elysée pattern beginning in 1890. It is most often described as green with scalloped edging and gold accents. The dishes are ironware semi-porcelain called transferware, a process by which a pattern is transferred or imprinted from an engraved, inked copper plate to a sheet of paper, then applied to unfired pottery which absorbs the ink from the paper. This might explain why the dishes now appear to me as blue versus green. The process was apparently developed in the 1750s, but mostly used in Staffordshire.

All this brings me to the photo. I wanted to capture the heart this story in a photograph. So I used my great-grandfather's monogrammed handkerchief to represent milk flowing from the Elysée creamer into a cup sitting in a small dessert bowl. In the cup are rocks to show a foundation, and sprigs of baby's breath to show growth. Milk is the symbol of, among other things, motherhood and fertility, purity and innocence, nurturing and domesticity, abundance and blessings. All elements of my great-grandfather's rise, as the son of an immigrant laborer and horse collar maker, from an apprentice clerk in a grocery distribution company to president of his own transfer business and Who's Who in the business world of St. Louis.

This is just one work of art in a series I call Art-ifacts which highlights the wonderful pieces of family history passed down to me, along with the memories and stories that go with them.