Rare Late 1800's Trade Card For Distributor Thorsen & Cassidy Co. Air Rifles
Description: This Rare Late 1800's Trade Card For Distributor Thorsen & Cassidy Co. Has Markham's Air Rifles advertised on it. The card is very beautiful with a girl & boy shooting birds with the air rifles.
There is a bird dog picture with several dead birds on the ground. The card was by Calvert Litho Co. The colors are soft and pastel.On the back the ad says " the "KING" and the "CHICAGO Air Rifles. In the latter part of the nineteenth century. Was a sleepy little town on the Rouge River 25 miles from. Settled in 1825 by descendants of the Pilgrims, the town took its name from the landing place in. Where their forefathers had first set foot in.
Can claim a few firsts of its own. For one thing, it was the birthplace of the toy air rifle. Credit for the invention of the first successful BB gun is usually given to William F. Markham--although some authorities claim that the original design may have been created by one George H.Sage, whose background is otherwise lost in the mists of history. Built in a small, two-story structure. S Challenger was a clumsy, brass-barreled gun that resembled a club more than a rifle. William Markham's Challenger was followed by other models from the company he formed--the Chicago (1888), the King (1890), the Prince (1900) and the Sentintel Repeater (1908).
Area by a distributor, Thorson & Cassady. Brief History of Trade Cards by Ben Crane. Over a century ago, during the Victorian era, one of the favorite pastimes was collecting small, illustrated advertising cards that we now call trade cards. These trade cards evolved from cards of the late 1700s used by tradesmen to advertise their services.Although examples from the early 1800s exist, it was not until the spread of color lithography in the 1870s that trade cards became plentiful. By the 1880s, trade cards had become a major way of advertising America's products and services, and a trip to the store usually brought back some of these attractive, brightly-colored cards to be pasted into a scrapbook. Some of the products most heavily advertised by trade cards were in the categories of: medicine, food, tobacco, clothing, household, sewing, stoves, and farm.
The popularity of trade cards peaked around 1890, and then almost completely faded by the early 1900s when other forms of advertising in color, such as magazines, became more cost effective. Although trade card collecting began over 100 years ago, today's strong interest in trade cards began relatively recently. Measures 5-1/2" W x 3-1/8" H. Condition: Corners and edges are slightly worn.