Mike Reed rescued this old photo depicting a horse-drawn L.A. Weikman ice delivery wagon and kindly let me scan it before the original goes to Palmyra Historical Society.
Look closely, and you can see “L.A. Weikman” painted on the side.
A mansard-roofed storefront (assumed from the Coca-Cola sign) sits at the intersection of two dirt and gravel roads; a utility pole stands at the corner. Two people walk along a sidewalk in opposite directions at right. A roof-top ad beckons us to try Bull Durham Smoking Tobacco.
I cannot place or date this remarkably preserved photograph, but I do hope a reader can.
The Weikman name might ring a bell for a couple of reasons. Mr. Louis A. Weikman was a Palmyra merchant who started out selling in flour and feed in the 1890s.
He later dealt in wood, ice, and coal through the early 1900s, He later sold his business interest to H.B. Williams about 1922 and reportedly moved west.
Louis A. Weikman, was the brother of August H. Weikman, the Titanic barber who survived the 1912 sinking. Will Valentino of Palmyra’s Historical & Cultural Society wrote a two-part article (Part One here; Part Two here) that appeared in Riverside’s Positive Press in 2012. (Also, can’t resist giving a plug to The Positive Press for being such a community booster to the river towns.)
Well, that’s all I got.
Stay tuned for a commercial message:
Please don’t ever assume that the Historical Society has all the answers or that we have pictures and information about everything. I faced this frustrating truth again recently while in search of how Palmyra and Riverton coped during the two World Wars. The newspaper runs for most of those arduous years are missing.
Even though the New Era published at least through the mid-1960s, we have no online issues past 1949. With each passing year the likelihood of discovering a trove of old newspapers in someone’s attic becomes more remote.
Newspapers collected for that microfilming effort back in the 1990 were borrowed and returned to owners after the project’s completion. Our more recent Newspaper Digitization Project consolidated the microfilmed four local newspaper titles and processed the content so that it can be read online.
We actually own very few original periodicals and photos. When a new one surfaces it is like discovering precious gold. Please search the library of newspaper titles and image titles, and if you have any newspapers or historic photos we don’t have, consider letting us scan them and glean what history we can from them. – JMc