(Click on image to enlarge)
This was a government-issued postal card of the kind that had been authorized by 1872 legislation. Apparently, the F. Madlener firm of Chicago bought a lot of these, stamped its own address on them, and handed them out to people to use for ordering its products.
The Madlener firm manufactured alcoholic beverages. Its most famous and profitable product was Fig Rye, a concoction of figs and rye whiskey touted as a health supplement. Fig Rye was first marketed sometime in the 1880s.[1]
J. Miller didn't bother to specify what was supposed to be in those pint and half-pint bottles, but it had to be some kind of alcohol. The fact that he ordered numerous small bottles, rather than one big one, suggests that his intent was sales, not his own personal use.
Now I'm wondering if he was selling, or trying to sell, alcohol in the village of Deep River. Its founder, John Wood, had been a temperance advocate, and had taken steps to keep saloons out of his village during his lifetime. Now in 1886, just three years after Wood's death, had his anti-saloon policy been abandoned already? Or was J. Miller a grocer, perhaps, who intended to sell Fig Rye as a health aid? … which, incidentally, just happened to produce drunkenness if you drank enough of it.
I would like to find out who J. Miller was, but with such a common surname and only an initial for his first name, the task seems hopeless.
Of course, I immediately thought of Ainsworth's John Miller. Born in Germany in 1865, he came to the U.S. in 1880 (1900 Census). It was in Chicago in 1896 that he married Martha Maybaum (Cook County, Illinois, Marriages Index). I do not know where he spent the years between 1880 and 1896, but his meeting and courting Martha, who lived in our area, probably took a little time. However, there is a problem with my hypothesis that the "J. Miller" of the postcard was this John Miller (besides the fact that I have no records to show him here in 1886): the handwriting and wording of the postcard don't suggest, to me, someone whose language until he was at least 15 years of age was German, and who was, in April 1886, just short of 21 years old and six years in this country. The postcard sounds as if it had been written by someone born in the U.S.
I turned to the on-line newspapers to try to find any mention of someone named Miller doing alcoholic business around Deep River circa 1886, and did not find it.
A saloon-keeping John Miller, born in Indiana in 1863, turns up in Griffith, St. John Township, in the 1900 Census. But I have absolutely no evidence that he ever tried doing business in Deep River!
I think our postcard-writer is going to be a mystery forever.
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[1] Source. Unfortunately, that source doesn't cite its own sources, and I could not find any other source giving even a general date for Fig Rye's introduction, nor any newspaper ads for it prior to the late 1890s.
