The Elusive Madam Rose

Here is an unusual artifact.  I've had it so long I can't remember where I got it.

The style of the bottle puts it somewhere around 1910, a date also suggested by the presence of a Food and Drug Act stamp from 1906.  Before that legislation you could put anything you darn well pleased into a bottle and sell it.  But who was D.I. Jones?

Most bottles of this type were put up by pharmacists as a sort of side line.  But recently when I decided to compile a list of early drug stores in my town I realized that the name Jones was nowhere to be found.  Something else going on here.

Mrs. D.I. Jones was a milliner.  She sold ladies hats.  From newspaper ads I can place her on Bridge Street in down town Chippewa Falls and date her enterprise from late 1901 to a known departure - both from the business and from town - in early 1913.  In a sense this would be a very reasonable side line for her.  Sell fancy hats to the ladies of the town and naturally they'd be interested in a nice complexion to go with them.  Who prepared the product for her is unclear.

Women in business in that era were uncommon.  Mostly they stayed home, took care of the household, raised the kids.  What women there were in the business community were often there out of financial need, and had constrained roles.  Nurse, governess, seamstress.  Maybe running a boarding house if you were a respectable widow type.  Millinery fits the pattern.  But who really was she?

The common last name combined with the now outdated practice of adopting a husband's name did make it a bit of a challenge, but I discovered that her name was Rose.  This of course makes sense given the name on the cosmetic bottle, and Madam would be a common title for someone in the beauty business.

She was married to David.  Now he's an interesting character.  In the 1900 census he is listed as being an electrician.  But a few years later, and styling himself as "Major" Jones, he was in partnership with a certain "Colonel" Richard H. Cosgriff and doing business as the Twentieth Century Amusement Company.  The 1910 census lists D.I. Jones with the occupation "Carnival Company".  They had a Ferris wheel and a merry go round along with other amusements and took them to county fairs and such around the state.   Oh, and they had a sideline that links to some of my other research.

I've previously written about the Gem Theater.  Well, this item appeared in a local paper:  "Richard Cosgriff and D.I. Jones are making the Gem a real family theater and it is proving a great success."  It does make sense, these guys were in the Amusement business and that tends to be rather seasonal.  Also D.I. being an electrician by trade would be a help.  I'm not sure what role Mrs. D.I. Jones played in the theater.  Her store was on Bridge street (so far I'm not sure where....Chippewa Falls had three milliners on that street in 1910!)  I guess ladies hats were a bigger business then than now.  I'd like to think she picked the name.  Some of the earliest ads for her establishment circa 1901 describe it as "A Gem of a Store".  

I assume that the Face Lotion was sold at the hat shop.  But it is worth noting that it is D.I. not Mrs. D.I. that is listed on the bottle.  Was he selling this concoction at county fairs?

I'd also like to think that the unlikely marriage of the Milliner and the Carney was a success.  But I'm thinking maybe not.  The 1910 census has them living at her father's house (her maiden name was Erickson and the census indicates her family was Norwegian).  She and David appear to have had two children, a boy and a girl.

But three years later the part of the paper that deals with local doings reported that she'd sold her millinery shop and was moving to Minneapolis.  No mention of her husband.  Well maybe it was to be expected.  Throughout history itinerant performers have been regarded with a degree of suspicion.  Even in their modern incarnation as "Carneys" they are figures outside the realm of polite society.  I say this by the way not in judgement but affectionately and based on my brief experiences in that world......

Regards the Twentieth Century Amusement Company I have found some very saucy information that will turn into another post in the near future.  There will be snakes involved.

A couple of images of the box for that Lotion.  Not in the best condition but as it is likely the only surviving example it warrants remembering.