RARE 1906 W.T. ALLEN COTTON FACTORING STORE WEST TENNESSEE PHOTO GROUP MYSTERY For Sale

RARE 1906 W.T. ALLEN COTTON FACTORING STORE WEST TENNESSEE PHOTO GROUP MYSTERY RARE 1906 W.T. ALLEN COTTON FACTORING STORE WEST TENNESSEE PHOTO GROUP MYSTERY

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If you wish, please bear with me as I will now tell you what I know about these mysterious photos in possibly one of the lengthiest items ever written. Otherwise, please scroll to the \"Cliff Notes\" summary at the bottom of page.

One research note before I continue: If you search online for \"W.T. Allen storefront Nashville\", you will find a number of references identifying the photograph or the album containing it, with Nashville or other Tennessee locations. I have traced these references and they originate from an earlier Facebook listing of the album rather than from independent historical documentation; that listing has now been removed. For that reason, I have not treated Nashville as an established location for this storefront, and the identification remains open pending further evidence.

Important: These twenty-three (23) 4\"x2-1/4\" photographs originally were part of a hand-dated 1906 small photo album.  They are unusually clear, detailed photographs for their period. The photo album is now disbound, but the photographs remain mounted on the original 4-1/2\"x4-1/2\" album pages. The pages were carefully removed from the original album cover/binding during my research, and so the original album cover/corpus is not included. All photos are shown, and most were cropped for the scans to just show the image without showing the page around it. Four originally unattached photos are also included with this grouping; they are shown in the last 2 gallery photos.

The story begins with a small, very unique, photo album I bought from a Facebook page. Hand-dated 1906 on the frontispiece, it contained a stunning photograph depicting the W.T. Allen General Merchandise 2-story brick storefront, with a full-height side wall painted-on-brick advertisements for \"Furniture, Coffins, Agricultural Implements, Plows, Wagons, Buggies and Cotton Factoring.\" This album was being sold as likely a Nashville-location collection. However, the photographs clearly appeared inconsistent with the idea of a Nashville collection: this was a rural-looking storefront selling coffins, agricultural implements and other merchandise, while also advertising cotton factoring. The other photos appear to document various aspects of a cotton operation: cotton factoring, cotton gin, cotton being weighed, cotton bales, cotton wagons, cotton fields, people associated with the operation, additional unidentified photographs, and almost in a non sequitur--hunting/fishing photographs. Taken together, these photographs appear to document not merely a general merchandise store, but some aspect of the cotton-growing, buying, weighing and/or processing economy surrounding the business.

The first significant clue came from a July 4, 1905 article in the Memphis Commercial Appeal reporting the first cotton blooms brought into Paris, Tennessee that year. One of the three farmers named was W.T. Allen. So, if this was the same W.T. Allen, then he was apparently a cotton farmer. Doing census searches we find a W.T. Allen born in Tennessee in 1868-1869, so he was around the age of 37 at the time the photos of his general store and cotton factoring business were taken.

Mind you, I had to discard or disregard a lot of search results, and yet selectively keep others that seemed to fit a somewhat cohesive 120-year-old-narrative. My hypothesis is that the four most plausible counties are in Western Tennessee: Henry, Gibson, Weakley and Carroll. If anyone recognizes the storefront, the surrounding landscape, the cotton gin, or the people in these photographs, I would be extremely interested in hearing from you.

Next, I looked at Federal Census and Tennessee marriage records. I found a W.T. Allen who married Maggie E. Harrison of Gibson County in 1892 (Dist 14 - Bradford). [Maggie, born in 1878, was the daughter of John W. & Ida Harrison of Bradford.] The 1890 Federal Census was mostly destroyed by fire, so there are no listings for that year\'s census. In 1900, the W.T. Allen family, with 3 children, is living and farming in Gibson, Civil District 14. But by 1910 their family is now farming and living in Civil District 3 of Carroll County.

Here is where it gets interesting. On this 1910 Federal Census, his occupation is listed as \"Farmer\", with \"Employer\" recorded in the class-of-worker column, while the industry is given as \"General Products\". This is intriguing because it suggests that his economic activities may have extended beyond simply farming, although exactly what the census enumerator intended by \"General Products\" remains uncertain. Coincidentally or not, his next door neighbor, William Galey, is also listed as a farmer in the General Products industry. Were they partners? Civil District 3, Carroll County, sits directly in its NW corner, bordering Weakley County (Gleason) to the north, Gibson County to the west, and Henry County to the east. This specific intersection explains why the clues span four different counties.

Given the apparent scale of the W.T. Allen cotton-factoring operation, proximity to a railroad or other transportation route would make considerable commercial sense. 

Moving on in time, the 1920 Federal Census shows that W.T. Allen\'s wife Maggie is already a widow, with three children. She is back in Gibson County, near the intersection of Old Rutherford & Kenton Roads.

After many, many hours of painstaking research, over several months - I was unable to determine exactly WHERE in rural (Western) Tennessee this business existed. I\'ll get back to this point below, with several ideas as to the possible reason(s). Also, while I live in Eastern Tennessee, I am unfamiliar with the small towns and topography of Western Tennessee.  Someone familiar the area may be able to easily ascertain the most probable location of this business. However, after an exhaustive image search of early 1900s architecture in the likely towns in those counties, I now suspect that the building may no longer exist. I called the Henry/Paris historical society and there was no record of this historical business or store being in Henry County. I also attempted to glean more relevant information from the Tennessee State Library & Archives, only to learn that their staff is not equipped to handle a major search of the four counties, and that it would be best to hire an expert researcher for such a query.

Please also know that I ruled out another person named W.T. Allen who lived in Janes Mill (Weakley County) and later in the Martin area - he was too old. The central figures you will see in the photos of the storefront and related activities are 40 years old or younger.

Then I found something that might explain why the storefront\'s location is so elusive, and why Maggie Allen was widowed by 1920. On October 12, 1911, a \"William Allen\" died of spinal meningitis at age 42, in Civil District 3 of Carroll County! His death record indicated that his county of birth was Robertson County, Tennessee (just north of Nashville).  If this William Allen was the same man, his death at only 42 could help explain why the business subsequently disappeared from the record.

I hit a brick wall, however, trying to connect the deceased William Allen to any Allen family living in Robertson County when he would have been a child, nor is there anything fully conclusive about W.T. Allen\'s childhood family in any of the aforementioned four counties.

So why did a massive storefront completely covered in vibrant advertisements in 1906 seemingly vanish from commercial directories later on? And where is the physical building? The fate of the building remains unknown. It may have disappeared as the surrounding community changed, or it may still survive in altered form under another name. Finding a photograph, Sanborn map, newspaper advertisement, deed, business directory entry, or local-history reference identifying the store would potentially solve the mystery.

I have included this research narrative because the photographs themselves present an unusually interesting historical mystery, and because I hope someone familiar with this part of Tennessee may be able to take the investigation further. I am deliberately distinguishing documented facts from my own research hypotheses below.

WHAT I BELIEVE:  The photographs date to approximately 1906 and document W.T. Allen\'s general merchandise/cotton-factoring operation somewhere in Western Tennessee, probably in or near the Henry/Gibson/Weakley/Carroll County area.

WHAT I HAVE BEEN UNABLE TO ESTABLISH: The precise town/location of the storefront, the definitive identity of W.T. Allen, and what ultimately happened to the building.

WHAT MIGHT SOLVE THE MYSTERY: A local historian, collector, genealogist, or researcher finding a photograph, Sanborn map, deed, business directory entry, newspaper reference - or someone simply recognizing the building or people. 
 

Please be sure to view the super-sized scans included with this listing, as they reveal considerably more detail.

 

 

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