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Rare original engraved trade card for Bowen & McNamee, one of antebellum New York City’s leading wholesale silk importing firms.
This finely engraved advertising card depicts the company’s landmark marble headquarters at 112 & 114 Broadway, New York, and lists the firm’s principal partners: Henry C. Bowen, Theodore McNamee, Samuel P. Holmes, and Henry L. Stone.
The reverse bears a period ink inscription addressed to Mrs. Fanny Comstock of Platteville, Grant County, Wisconsin, illustrating the firm’s commercial reach into the rapidly growing American frontier during the 1850s.
Historical Significance
Bowen & McNamee was more than a successful luxury silk importer. Senior partner Henry Chandler Bowen was a prominent abolitionist and former clerk of Arthur and Lewis Tappan. Following passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, Bowen refused to support pro-slavery merchant initiatives in New York, resulting in boycotts from Southern customers. He later became publisher of The Independent, one of the nation’s leading anti-slavery newspapers.
The engraved building shown on the front was one of Broadway’s celebrated white marble commercial palaces and represented a milestone in New York’s commercial architecture before eventually being demolished in the late nineteenth century.
This small card represents an exceptional intersection of antebellum commerce, abolitionist history, early New York architecture, international silk trade, and westward expansion.
Condition
Please examine all photographs carefully.
Heavy age toning, foxing, staining, edge wear, corner wear, and surface wear consistent with approximately 175 years of age. The engraving remains well defined, and the handwritten inscription is clear and legible. Sold exactly as shown.
Item Details
* Original engraved merchant advertising/trade card
* Bowen & McNamee
* 112 & 114 Broadway, New York
* Approximate date: circa 1850–1855
* Reverse addressed to Mrs. Fanny Comstock, Platteville, Grant County, Wisconsin
* Original nineteenth-century paper and ink
* Unrestored
A scarce and historically significant piece of early American commercial ephemera that would make an excellent addition to collections of abolitionist history, New York City, advertising, architecture, silk trade, paper ephemera, or pre-Civil War Americana.
