Hagley Library is making up for lost time during our Digital Archives relaunch, with lots of new items and collections to share. Here's one of them!

This catalog from the Colored Mail Order Corporation of America dates to around 1939. The company was founded in Kansas City, Missouri by Chester Arthur Franklin (1880-1955), a local businessman and the editor and publisher of the Kansas City Call, the city's weekly newspaper covering issues of interest to the city's Black community. The company was Black-owned and operated, and marketed clothes, housewares, and other products to Black consumers across the country.

The company, which promoted itself as being "the largest business of its kind" operated with a mission statement that aimed to persuade its customers that "If you want more jobs for yourselves and your children, if you want greater opportunity for training in business, if you realize that colored people must provide for their own economic growth and security through mutual cooperation ..."

Welcome to the spookiest time of the year, earth mortals! This week, the Hagley Vault is offering the black arts, mesmerism, and witchcraft at a low, low price, courtesy of the ca. 1902 Descriptive Catalogue of Standard Works, Treating on Occultism, Theosophy, Astrology, Mesmerism, Mind-cure, Spiritualism, Psychology, Physiology, Hygiene, Etc.

The catalog was issued by the Prospectors' and Miners' Agency of Palmyra, Pennsylvania. The company, run by Abram Gingrich Stauffer (1862-1928) and his son Oscar (1883-1943), as well as the apparently unrelated Abraham Schopp Stauffer (1887-1951), was a distributor and manufacturer of inexpensive publications, novelties, and various nostrums and elixers. The Stauffers also operated multiple similar companies, including the Electric Motor Company, Gem Novelty Company, Diamond Publishing Company, Franklin Drug Company, Smith Remedy Company, Stauffer and Company, and Hall and Company.

Leaf-raking season is here, but here's an arboreal chore to put that work into perspective.

This 1923 photograph shows workers hired by Pierre S. "P.S." du Pont (1870-1954) moving a beech tree from a nearby property to the north corner greenhouse of his Longwood Gardens estate.

The gardens had their roots in Peirce's Park, an arboretum created by Joshua (1766-1851) and Samuel Peirce (1766-1838), who planted their collections of native and exotic trees on the land near their family's farmhouse in Kennett Square, Pennsylvania. After the brothers' death, the land remained in the family, but their arboretum deteriorated over the decades, as ensuing generations lost interest in the property.

In 1906, a lumber mill operator was contracted to remove the trees. But the park wound up being rescued by P.S. du Pont, who purchased the property in July 1906 with the goal of protecting the collection.

If Christmas Creep is real, surely the creepiest season deserves some creep of its own, no? This week's Hagley Vault offers a spooky campfire tale from the Ohio Bell Telephone Company's Ohio Story television and radio series, issued as a Halloween episode in 1947. 

In its time, the Ohio Story was the longest running regional scripted program in the nation, and at least 1,309 radio and 175 television episodes were produced. This episode of the series focused on the haunted history of the Piatt family's Mac-O-Chee castle in West Liberty, Ohio.

This recording is part of Hagley Library's Culley family collection of Cinecraft Productions audiovisual materials (Accession 2018.201). Cinecraft Productions was founded in 1939 by Ray Culley (1904-1983) and Betty (Buehner) Culley (1914-2016) in Cleveland, Ohio.