The Music Store

click to enlarge

The neighborhood music store has mostly vanished from Main Street in America. Years ago, it was the shop that sold musical instruments suitable for beginners to  advanced musicians; displayed sheet music for the latest popular songs and dances; carried necessary supplies like replacement strings for your guitar or valve oil for your cornet; offered music lessons; and even hired out musicians for local entertainment.

Sometimes they even offered haircuts too.




This antique photo postcard is scratched and creased, but it shows just such a music store. And at the entrance stands a family orchestra of a mother and father with their 4 children. Father holds his guitar, while his daughter and three sons pose with their violins and mandolins.

This unknown family of musicians left no identification on the card, but if we look closely there are clues.

Above the shop doorway are two signs:

The Chicago Tribune
The World's Greatest Newspaper

and:

Agency
Souders Laundering Co.

As it is unlikely that the Chicago Tribune advertised outside the Midwest, we will start in Illinois.

The name Sounders is not common but a search through Ancestry.com turns up a few choices in Rock Island, Illinois.

In the 1910 US Census for Rock Island we find, Wallace Souders, age 35, occupation - Laundryman. The City Directory is even better and the 1907 edition has a listing for:
SOUDERS LAUNDRYING CO. THE (Wallace and M R Souders) successors to The American Steam Laundry 501-503 12th.

Wallace and his mother Mrs. Mae Souders ran a laundry business in Rock Island from 1907 until 1921, as the listing disappears after 1922.

So now we have a time frame and a place. Any other clues?

The music store signs are clear and next to the wonderful barber's pole is a window sign posting prices for a haircut and a shave. If you look through the window to the left, you can even see a certificate - perhaps the barber's license?  In this decade, Rock Island had three stores that sold pianos, and about 34 barber shops.

But the best clue I think is the family themselves. Their complexion and dress strongly suggest a heritage from the Mediterranean rather than the Baltic, and I would eat my hat if they were not recent immigrants from Southern Italy. Yet despite my best efforts, I can not find them in Rock Island, IL.

All three music stores were owned by men with non-Italian names, and who did not have a family of four children. And none of the music stores had an address that also matched an address for a barber shop. Though some shops were on the same street as a music store, just a few numbers away, not one of the 34 barbers had an Italian name.

One of the search tricks in Ancestry.com, is to set no names but instead check only  birthplace-exact and place-exact. Using Italy (exact) and Rock Island (exact) produces interesting results. In 1900, Rock Island had only 10 people who had immigrated from Italy. That population increased in 1910 to 112, and in 1920 to 125. But the geography makes this a bigger challenge. Situated on an important crossing of the Mississippi River, the Quad Cities confusingly includes 5 cities; Rock Island, Moline, and East Moline, Illinois and Davenport and Bettendorf, Iowa. But even when you expand the search to include all these communities, there are surprisingly very few Italian names.


Predictably, most immigrants to Rock Island were of German or Swedish origin, but curiously there were a lot of people from Belgium, almost 400 in 1910. Russian immigrants, who almost always had Yid or Hebrew added to their nationality, followed with nearly as many - 248.  The 1900 and 1910 censuses recorded no one from Spain or Portugal, though there were a number of single men from Greece working as laborers on street and sewer projects. When Italian men lived with a spouse and family, they tended to operate a Fruit Stand, or a Confectionery. One Italian in Davenport had a listed occupation:  Macaroni Maker.  But not one was a barber, or a musician, or a music store owner.


There is just no way to know how large an area that Souders Laundry collected washing. With easy access to railroads, an Agency of a laundry might even be a greater distance outside of the Quad Cites than we would expect today.

And this guitarist and his family, though they may likely have come from Italy, could have been the fruit seller across the street, who has just acquired new string instruments for the family. So this photo puzzle will have to remain unsolved.

But look at the pride in those faces. Music was very important to this family. Both the violin and the mandolin, which has the same string tuning, have always been associated with Italian culture. Italian musicians from Naples were the first to popularize the mandolin in America. The musical traditions of immigrants helped to shape our American culture and this family is a perfect example of that legacy.

This is my contribution to Sepia Saturday

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