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Photo postcard of Trathen’s Emporium, Idaho Springs, CO, 1912.

John Trathen was born in Cornwall, England, in November of 1847, and his wife, Mary (last name unknown), also from England, was born in June of 1852.  They married in 1873 and immigrated to the United States in 1877.

John’s initial endeavors in Colorado were in Central City, where he worked in the mines.   He subsequently gained success as a mining contractor and leaser and rose to the position of superintendent of the Hyland and Beauzy mines in 1879 and afterwords the Salisbury, Franklin, Silver Age and Fortunates mines. 

John, also known as “Johnny,” was widely respected in Clear Creek County and deeply involved with the Idaho Springs community.  He served as the town’s postmaster in the seven years before he died, served three terms as mayor, two terms as alderman and three terms as Clear Creek County coroner.   He was very active in the Republican Party and fraternal organizations.  He was definitely a “lodge” man, with memberships in the Benevolent Protective Order of Elks, the Improved Order of Red Men, and a 33-year membership in the Knights of Pythias.   

The Emporium – “We furnish from the cellar to the garret.”

Johnny Trathen got into the retail business in 1890, forming a partnership with a man named Benjamin Holley.  In addition to their store in Idaho Springs, they would establish branch stores in Silver Plume and Georgetown. 

The dictionary defines an emporium as a retail store selling a wide variety of goods, and Trathen’s newspaper advertising slogan was meant to convey that: “We furnish from the cellar to the garret.”  (I had to look up the word “garrett.”  Per Webster, it means “a room or unfinished part of a house just under the roof.”)  I think a perusal of the front windows of Johnny and Benjamin’s store, upon which the names of the store’s offerings have been painted, would lead most people to the conclusion that they offered quite a variety of things.  There are linoleum, wallpaper, carpets, rugs, household furnishings, office and general merchandise items, paints, oils and glass.  Services provided included undertaking, embalming and funerals, the latter indicated by the word “chapel” painted on the glass in the door on the left.

The occupations of furniture maker and undertaker were meant for each other.  Who better to make your loved one a coffin than your local furniture maker?   And if you could make coffins, what better craft to learn than undertaking?    And with undertaking under your belt, service as a county coroner was not unexpected. As pointed out earlier, Johnny held the post three times for Clear Creek County. 

The B.P.O.E.

As you can see in the photo, Johnny and Benjamin have bedecked their establishment with patriotic bunting framing the figure of an elk above each door.  The elks and the imitation clock with “B P O E” on its face are references to the fraternal organization known as the Benevolent Protective Order of Elks.  The organization was founded in New York City on February 16, 1868, growing out of a small group of actors and entertainers calling itself the “Jolly Corks.”  They met regularly on Sundays and developed a ritual of toasting the absent members.  When one of their members died in December of 1867, leaving his wife and children destitute, the group was sobered and decided it should dedicate itself to serving others.  They decided to name themselves after a noble creature of the wild in America. 

There were two noble creatures up for consideration by the group, i.e., the elk and the buffalo.  Leading the fight for the buffalo was member Charles Algernon Sidney Vivian, an English-born actor, who belonged to the British fraternity known as the Royal Antediluvian Order of Buffaloes.  Alas, though, the final vote was 8 for the elk and 7 for the buffalo.  And so it would be the Elk, distinctively American, oriented to the family, and subscribing to the cardinal principles of Charity, Justice, Brotherly Love and Fidelity. 

The Elks met at night and their toast to absent members would be formalized as the “Eleven O’Clock Toast.”  The toast would become part of the Elks’ emblem, a clock permanently showing the time as 11:00.  You’ll note that Johnny and Benjamin have mounted this emblem at the center of the storefront.   

The Elks’ decorations were hung in anticipation of the B.P.O.E.’s Colorado state reunion to be held in 1912 in Idaho Springs on September 13, 14 and 15th.  Johnny was getting out the word for this event on the reverse side of this postcard, which he has addressed to R. C. Oats.  Johnny writes to Oats, “Stores decorated for B.P.O.E. reunion 1912.  The grandest Elks reunion ever held in the State of Colorado.”  It’s from the remainder of what he has written on the postcard that we learn he is the man standing at the left, and that the two men on the right are two of the Emporium’s clerks.

Promoting Sales

I like Johnny and Benjamin’s use of crepe paper in their window displays to draw the eye toward the featured pieces of furniture.  I didn’t even know there was crepe paper back then, but learned on the internet that it was invented in the 1890’s and was initially touted as a fabric.  The Dennison Manufacturing Company, the first American manufacturer of the product, touted it as “one of the most valuable fabrics for decorative purposes yet placed upon the market.”  During World War I, the Dennison company and Kimberly-Clark introduced a medical version, referring to it as “medical cotton,” claiming it could be used for 75 percent of all surgical dressings, thus saving woven gauze for the most critical needs.  In the 1920’s, the Milwaukee Health Department would adopt the use of crepe-paper uniforms, claiming that its 70 visiting nurses could wear a uniform several times. A fresh one would be used after the nurse went to a home with a communicable disease.

Breaking the Money Trust

Note the words “NOT in the TRUST” painted on the wall beneath the B.P.O.E. clock.  This was almost certainly a reference to the business practice at the time whereby a number of investment banks, including J. P. Morgan and Company, would gain a controlling interest in a group, or “trust,” of corporations by exercising their authority to appoint members of the corporations’ boards of directors.  It raised the question for a riled public, “Are a few bankers running the whole ” and the public demanded that Congress take action.  In response, `the House Banking Committee, led by U.S. Representative Arsene Pujo of Louisiana and investigator Samuel Untermeyer, investigated the “Money Trust” and exposed the extent of its economic influence. As a result of the Pujo Committee investigation, Congress passed the Clayton Anti-trust Act, which banned interlocking directorships, created the Federal Trade Commission to oversee economic competition, and created the Federal Reserve to lessen the Trust’s control over the nation’s money supply.

To the celestial garrett….

On September 22, 1913, just a little over one year following the B.P.O.E. reunion, Johnny would pass away.  He was 65.  He had not been well for some time, but as his obituary states, three days before his death “he was on the streets with that same amiable disposition and happy smile that was part of his big-hearted nature.”  His stature in the community was such that Idaho Springs mayor George McClelland declared the flag be flown at half-mast during his funeral on the afternoon of September 28th,1913.

Mary Trathen would pass away on January 2, 1918.  Described in her obituary as a “neat little woman of charming personality” with many loving friends, at the time of her death she had reportedly been ailing from appendicitis, and it was thought she was in need of an appendectomy.  She was survived by a sister in Idaho Springs, a sister in Sterling and a brother in California. 

Johnny and Mary’s remains are interred at the Idaho Springs Cemetery.  They had no children.

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