Eli Pettijohn Cereal Company American Cereal Company (1 results)

No Binding. Condition: Collectible-Very Good. Original trade card with a color illustration of songbird perched on a branch in a wintry landscape. Snow-covered houses are shown in the back. 5" x 3 1/2." Trade card is very clean and intact except for age toning on back and light smudges on front. A Very Good copy. Trade card promoting the product, "Pettijohn's California Breakfast Food." The back of the card shows a small black-and-white illustration of a California grizzly bear, a recurring image on Pettijohn products, and promotional text by the company discouraging the consumption and purchase of oatmeal. According to this text, titled, "The Oatmeal Superstition," oatmeal is not nutritious and not the healthiest food for people and animals. Pettijohn's adds another questionable claim, saying, "[C]racked or rolled wheat is the food for the nervous, studious, or housekeeping women and children .," thus suggesting that wheat is superior to oatmeal. No company is named but the product was likely manufactured by the Eli Pettijohn Cereal Company or the American Cereal Company. The history of Pettijohn's Breakfast Food begins with its founder, Eli Pettijohn. Pettijohn was a millwright who opened a flour mill called Richfield Mills around 1854 along Minnehaha Creek in Minnesota. It was around this time when he first came up with the idea for Pettijohn's Breakfast Food, a cereal made of rolled wheat. In 1876, Pettijohn moved from Minneapolis to San Francisco, California. He resumed his cereal business in 1877 by marketing his cereal as "Pettijohn's Rolled Wheat." After an apparent hiatus in business operations beginning in 1880, the company reopened in 1884. From about 1884 onward, "Pettijohn's Breakfast Food" joined a lineup of other brand names such as "Pettijohn's Breakfast Germs" and "Pettijohn's Breakfast Pearls." By 1890, Pettijohn's cereal was well-known in the western states. In 1892, Pettijohn joined at least two other business partners and the company was renamed, "Pettijohn's Manufacturing & Milling Company." It is unclear when the overlap of the Eli Pettijohn Cereal Company, American Cereal Company, and Quaker Oats Company begins but online resources suggest the period from about the 1890s to the early 1900s. Some sources state that Pettijohn's Breakfast Food was acquired by Quaker Oats in 1893, but the actual Pettijohn company may have remained open. It appears that Pettijohn sold his company to the American Cereal Company in the 1890s. Trade cards are antique business cards that first became popular during the late seventeenth century in Paris and Lyon, France and London, England. Trade cards were often given by business owners and proprietors to patrons and customers as a way to promote their businesses. Prior to the use of street addresses, some trade cards had maps so clients could locate the associated business. Many of these cards also incorporated elaborate designs, illustrations, and other decorative features. Trade cards became popular in the United States during the nineteenth century in the period after the Civil War. The late nineteenth century also saw the advent of trade card collecting as a hobby. While they are no longer in use, trade cards influenced the formation of trading cards and were the predecessors of modern-day business cards.