Re-posted
This is just one small example of why these intertunnels, as Sipp terms them, are so cool.
I posted a pic of a nice oil lamp I picked up at a junk shop in Ohio. An alert reader promptly identified it as a Rayo lamp made by Bradley and Hubbard in Meriden, CT., around or before the turn of the century.
Apparently The Standard Oil Company (it was pure coincidence that I mentioned Rockefeller in my post) was pushing Bradley and Hubbard lamps to sell kerosene.
When I was a kid we had a barrel of kerosene with a spigot on a stand in the garage. Kerosene was useful for all sorts of things, including burning the garbage and for taking paint off your hands. Also, to make torches to burn the tent caterpillar things out of the fruit trees. Funny, haven't seen many of those lately. Kerosene has a good garage smell.
Then I learned this at Ebay:
Bradley & Hubbard was one of the inspirational leaders of the Roycroft movement in New York, well known for their arts and crafts industry. Walter Hubbard and his brother-in-law Nathaniel Lyman Bradley, started making cast iron clocks,tables,frames,andirons,chandlers and lamps. The company became Bradley and Hubbard manufacturing co in 1875. They turned out some of the most outstanding leaded glass lamps you'll find.
So they manufactured all sorts of lamps back when CT was a manufacturing center. There are all sorts of old Bradley and Hubbard lamps for sale online.
I also learned that Mr. Hubbard funded and helped design the 1800-acre Hubbard Park in Meriden, CT. He hired the great Frederick Law Olmstead to work on that park. And in the process of the above, readers informed me about Lehman's store in Kidron, Ohio. Kidron was settled in 1819 by Swiss Mennonites. Rural Ohio has lots of Amish and Mennonite communities.
What a cool world we live in.
