Albany Female Proprietors

The decorated woman’s hat shown here was made and sold by Hendrie [&] Campbell, an Albany millinery partnership formed by Scottish immigrants Isabelle B. Hendrie and Mary J. Campbell. Located first on N. Pearl Street and then at 11 Leonard Place, the firm of Hendrie [&] Campbell competed with roughly three dozen other milliners and lasted for over thirty years. A major competitor was the McQuade Millinery Shop at 234 State Street, which was also a female-owned business.

The McQuade sisters, Maude C. and Mary E., and the Scottish immigrants Hendrie and Campbell were four of the thousands of female entrepreneurs who ran small businesses in the Capital Region between about 1830 and 1930. Most female entrepreneurs were found in the millinery and dressmaking trades, but women in the Capital Region also made and sold men’s collars, shirts, boots, furnishings, and cigars. They ran boarding houses, restaurants, commercial laundries, hotels, saloons, tobacco shops, and liquor stores. A few women were undertakers, blacksmiths, coopers, and plumbers. Small businesses like the McQuade Millinery Shop and Hendrie [&] Campbell began to vanish from downtown neighborhoods in the twentieth century, finding it difficult to compete with department stores.

Was Albany uniquely friendly to businesswomen? It is difficult to say. Thanks to recent scholarship, we know more about female entrepreneurs in the Capital Region than other regions of the United States.

America’s First Christmas Card

Our modern Santa Claus is a product of the Hudson River Valley. In the seventeenth century, the Dutch brought to the valley their Sinterklaas, which later merged with Father Christmas and the popular fourth-century Saint Nicolas, the Greek Bishop of Myra. But during the nineteenth century, three individuals firmly connected this figure to the holiday season: Clement Clarke Moore and his poem, “A Visit from St. Nicholas,” publishedin the Troy Sentinel in 1823; Washington Irving, who wrote several Christmas stories; and, Thomas Nast, whose illustrations established the appearance of Santa Claus that we all recognize today.

Little known, however, is the Albany merchant named Richard H. Pease, who linked Santa Claus to the burgeoning consumerism that marked the nineteenth century, and which continues to be a defining characteristic of the holiday. In the December 17, 1842, issue of the Albany Evening Journal, Pease used a woodcut image of Santa Claus to advertise the gift wares sold at his Great Variety Store. The same illustration appeared a week later in the Albany Argus. Years later, Pease established another first; he printed the first Christmas card in America. A small lithograph showing a family surrounded by holiday gifts, food and drink, and Pease’s store (then called the Temple of Fancy), this first American Christmas card was probably printed for the 1849–1850 holiday season, although it could have been printed as early as 1847, the year he opened his store. Pease operated his variety store only until 1855 before selling the inventory and turning over the building to his son, Harry E. Pease.