Food: Production & Consumption

Hagley's twentieth-century archival collections include advertisements for food products as well as internal company information that can be used to ascertain the objectives of advertising campaigns. The Seagram collection is a particularly rich source, with clear links between market research, company planning, and resultant advertising campaigns. Our international collection of Seagram advertisements includes television commercials. DuPont's advertisements for Cellophane can also be traced to specific firm objectives. 

Before the widespread use of magazine advertising, firms relied heavily on trade cards to promote their products. Hagley owns more than 3,500 trade cards published from the late 1800s through the early years of the twentieth century. The collection includes many food-related items, such as coffee, tea, root beer, baking powder, cornstarch, condensed milk, flour, spices, confectionery, and ice cream. It also contains numerous trade cards on kitchens and cooking utensils, including illustrations of stoves and ranges, cutlery, and enameled ironware, as well as more unusual items like coffee and spice mills and an ice cream freezer. 

Food consumption practices are well documented in Hagley's collections. Detailed data are available, beginning with the U.S. government's studies of food prices (1840-1900) and consumption, continuing through The Post-War Food Dollar (1945) and What's Happening to Mealtime? (1979). Complementing these stand-alone studies are the extensive surveys in the Seagram collection that explore consumer preferences for food and other items, especially after 1950. 

Through its business and family collections, Hagley has extensive narrative information on American foodways from the early nineteenth century to the present. Cooking and "receipt" books include information on dining practices, food preparation methods, and menus. Commencing with American Domestic Cookery (1823) and encompassing many manufacturers' recipe booklets and World's Fair publications (such as the 1982 Official World's Fair Cookbook), these materials span the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Valuable information can also be gleaned from Hagley's holdings of company magazines directed at employees. These publications have a "women's" or "family" section devoted to domestic matters, including homemaking hints and recipes and descriptions of company events involving food. 

Corporate archives routinely include menus of banquets and convention dinners, from the seven-course meals enjoyed by captains of industry in the Edwardian Age to more prosaic annual meeting lunches, occasionally documented by photographs. The Pierre S. du Pont papers include information about hospitality, including what food was served at his home, Longwood, and food service at the Hotel du Pont in Wilmington, Delaware. The Pennsylvania Railroad Company records contain some dining-car menus and a report by Raymond Loewy on developing "prefab" meals. 

Photographic collections from corporations including DuPont, Westinghouse, and Lukens Steel depict food-related scenes of employees eating at company picnics and banquets and in cafeterias. Other images of "food events" can be found throughout the pictorial collection. 

Hagley itself was a site with its own foodways. The DuPont company made gunpowder between 1802 and 1921 on the grounds now occupied by Hagley's museum and library. Our collections document the foodways of the workers, managers, and owners who lived on Hagley's grounds or nearby. The personal papers of the du Pont family members, especially those of E. I. du Pont's daughters Sophie, Victorine, Evelina, and Eleuthera, contain information on family dining and traditional family recipes. Oral interviews with the last generation of powder workers and their children include detailed information on the foodways of the Irish and Italian workers in the Hagley yards, especially for the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The interviews describe what people grew, what they obtained from merchants, what they ate, and how they prepared it. Louise du Pont Crowninshield lived at Hagley after gunpowder production ceased. Her personal papers detail the customs of sociability among the very wealthy in the early and mid-twentieth century. An accurate reconstruction of her kitchen from the 1920s is on view for museum visitors.