York: November 2007 Archives

We didn't know how bad smoking was for our health 90 years ago, when cigar factories were springing up everywhere. In York County, we knew cigars were very good for our economy. For well over 150 years, processing tobacco into cigars kept many York Countians gainfully employed.

Lewis Miller illustrated a group of youths, himself among them, making cigars in 1811 at the shop of "William Spangler, Tobacconist." They were Henry Sheffer, John Lehman, Jacob Weiser, Lewis Miller, Daniel Masse, Daniel Wolf, Emanuel Sheffer, John Jones, and Henry Wagner. Miller would have been around 15 at the time. Some of the boys look quite a bit younger.

According to the Red Lion Area Historical Society webpage, in the month of October 1929, 15 million cigars were shipped out of the Red Lion train station on the Maryland and Pennsylvania Railroad. This wouldn't have included the millions more made each month in factories large and small in York and just about every community in the county.

My grandfather, Edwin Shelley, converted a three-story house into a cigar factory in Lucky, Chanceford Township. Grandpa wasn't alone as shown in the following Gazette article from the fall of 1917:

One hundred and fifty years ago York Countians loved to have their photograph taken. The art of practical photography was less than 20 years old, but there were at least two outstanding photographers in York. We seem to hear most often about Glenalvin Goodridge, perhaps because his father William is known as the first successful African American businessman in York.

J. Thomas Williams may have been more prolific than Goodridge, judging from the examples of his work that have survived. He was also very accomplished, as attested in the following ad, which had already been running in the Gazette for at least two and a half years in the fall of 1857:

We know York Countians have had a long love affair with the oyster. Start digging near the site of any old tavern, such as the Golden Plough, and you are likely to turn up remnants of long-ago oyster shells. Crushed oyster shells might be far under the streets you travel daily, since they were used as an early paving material.

With its proximity and trade orientation to Baltimore and the Chesapeake Bay, oysters have always been popular here, especially in the months with an “R” in them. Why are oysters still mostly consumed in those months, September through April? There seems to be several reasons: Oysters reproduce during the summer months, keeping up a good supply of oysters; in the old days refrigeration wasn’t available, leading to spoilage in hot weather; and the quality is said to not be as good in the summer.

We just wish the prices were the same as those in the following Gazette ad for Bozman’s Oyster House on South George Street 110 years ago, in the fall of 1897:

One hundred years ago, in the fall of 1907, the Gazette ran the following article:

“A horse and dog hospital and a horse ambulance are new things promised for York. The York Rendering Works, of which E. A. Dempwolf is manager, is trying to interest local members of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals and others in the matter of raising a fund for the purchase of an ambulance which can be used to haul sick horses to a hospital which will be established in this city.”

The proposal goes on to say that as the horses recuperate,

Ninety years ago York Mayor Hugentugler presided over a frequently lively police court: One case involved a "near murder" with a hatchet on the 500 block of Vander Avenue. The York Gazette reported the husband