Grocery shopping may seem like a pretty mundane thing to blog about. During the holiday season food – getting it, preparing it, sharing it, and reminiscing about previous culinary triumphs and disasters – is part of the celebration. The way we shop for food has changed dramatically with the advent of huge one-stop-shop chain stores and fewer locally owned markets. Fortunately, in
Nebraska Memories we can see what some earlier Nebraska food stores looked like because the owners hired photographers for advertising.
One of the earliest images is a Fred McVay photograph in the
Butler County Gallery of the
Hrock Meat Market. Joseph Hrock opened the butcher shop in Brainard in 1898, and sold meat from his slaughterhouse on his farm at Loma. We don’t know where the butcher shop in the 1907-1917 era John Nelson photo on the left from the
Nebraska State Historical Society collection was located. Sausages, hams and ribs hang on the walls, and best of all there is a turkey on the scale. Was it going to be Thanksgiving or Christmas dinner for the
Family in the Shop ?
Andrew K. Greenlee, a pioneer settler in Cheyenne County, owned
Greenlees Department Store in Sidney. This 1928 photo from the
Cheyenne County Historical Society shows the grocery department. It looks quite large with at least two long corridors lined with fresh and canned goods carefully displayed .
How about the spectacular
I.W. Rosenblatt Food Store window display in this 1937 William Wentworth photo from the
Durham Museum collection? It must have taken hours to put that together. I can’t imagine the employees actually trying to fetch something from those pyramids for a customer.
Finally, I couldn’t resist including this World War 2 era Wentworth photo of
Women shopping in a grocery store. My mother had a full-lenth muskrat coat that looked a lot like the ones these ladies are sporting. I wonder if they drove to the store themselves or were taken by their husbands like my mom, who didn’t learn to drive until the early 70s, was.
Visit
Nebraska Memories to search for or browse through many more historical images digitized from photographs, negatives, postcards, maps, lantern slides, books and other materials.
Nebraska Memories is a cooperative project to digitize Nebraska-related historical and cultural heritage materials and make them available to researchers of all ages via the Internet. Nebraska Memories is brought to you by the Nebraska Library Commission. If your institution is interested in participating in Nebraska Memories, see
http://nlc.nebraska.gov/nebraskamemories/participation.aspx for more information, or contact
Beth Goble, Historical Projects Librarian, or
Devra Dragos, Technology & Access Services Director.
The picture of the ladies shopping inspired me to relate how my mother tried to raise my sister and I (little brother didn’t count!). From how she grew up, when you left the house, whether it was to the mailbox, groceries, having coffee with the neighbor, anything that took you out of the house, you dressed up. My mother grew up with hearing “no one is going to think we are poor”. So here I am growing up in the late 60’s and 70’s. Boy, did we try any and everything to wear jeans, have our hair hang straight, wear short skirts, not wear nylons. I could go on and on. We laugh about it now.
Oh yes Ann! My mother never left the house without makeup. When I was in school girls weren’t allowed to wear pants. We wore snow pants over our skirts to walk to school, then took them off. Thanks for sharing your memories with us! I didn’t have a brother so can’t speak for how much one would have gotten away with!