PRIMARY SOURCES: TRADE CARDS

Connecting to Our Collections

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, businesses commonly advertised with trade cards. Usually about the size of modern baseball cards, trade cards were made of card stock and fit in the palm of the hand. One one side, there was usually some sort of attention-getting illustration. On the other, there was advertising copy, especially the name and address of a merchant that sold the product. In an era before radio, television, or computers — when magazines were expensive and neither magazines nor newspapers had color illustrations — trade cards were sensible, affordable means of advertising. And because they featured interesting illustrations, people liked and often even collected them. Factories that manufactured textiles, as well as the shops and stores that sold them, used trade cards. Consequently, the Mill Museum has quite a few in its collection. Many of them can be accessed by the public through the Museum’s pages on the Connecticut Digital Archives at the University of Connecticut’s Dodd Center of the Homer Babbidge Library, available by clicking here. Others can be accessed on the Mill Museum’s own CatalogIt online catalog site, available by clicking here. And a few are reprinted just below.