Vintage 1970s R. H. Shumway Aster Seed Packet 🌸 NOS | Heart of France Red

Who Sold Seeds Like These? 🌸 Vintage 1970s R. H. Shumway Aster Seed Packet, NOS

Size: 5" x 3 1/2"

I love how much history fits on this little envelope. The flower was named in honor of France during World War One, the seed house was started on a family farm by a Civil War soldier in 1870, and the back tells you the year it was printed if you know where to look.

🌸 What's On It

The front reads ASTER and HEART OF FRANCE — RED over one huge red double aster with green leaves, set against a black block, and across the bottom in heavy black type, R. H. Shumway Seedsman, ROCKFORD, ESTABLISHED 1870, ILLINOIS. Down at the foot, printed upside down in tiny letters, is SCHMIDT LITHO. CO. S.F. MADE IN U.S.A., and under it No. 1324.

The back is all growing directions. Asters are "half-hardy annuals of great beauty," 18 to 30 inches tall, in pinks, roses, blues, purples, crimson and white. Sow them indoors in flats in early spring, dig in "a generous amount of thoroughly decayed manure," plant them 12 to 15 inches apart and keep the faded flowers picked off. These were never filled, so the flaps are still open.

🔎 The Back Tells You When

Look in the bottom corner of the back and you'll find a tiny 77 next to a little four-dot mark. That's the printer's run code. The Henry Ford museum dates this printer's seed packets by the very same two-digit number, and Shumway packets from the same 77 run carry the Stecher-Traung-Schmidt name, which only existed after Schmidt merged with Stecher-Traung in 1966. So these were printed in 1977, even though the plate still has the older Schmidt Litho name on it. Printers kept running old plates for years. You'll see this packet called 1950s or 1960s around the trade, but the back says 77.

🇫🇷 Heart of France

James Vick's Sons of Rochester, New York introduced Heart of France for 1919. They first showed it at the Rochester Exposition in the fall of 1918, with the war still going, and named it in honor of "heroic, steadfast France." Vick's sent a bouquet of them to the French Ambassador in Washington, J. J. Jusserand, and printed his thank-you letter in their 1919 catalogue: "In the heart of France there has ever been a large place for America." Vick's called it the best pure red aster ever introduced, it was 25 cents a packet that first year, and other seed houses picked it up through the 1920s and 30s. Shumway sold it for decades as catalogue number 2096, 12 cents a packet in 1940 and 20 cents in 1962, "early, opens purest ruby red."

🌱 R. H. Shumway, the Pioneer American Seedsman

Roland Hallett Shumway was born in 1842 at Kishwaukee in Winnebago County, Illinois, where his father had settled after coming out from Vermont. He served in the Civil War with the 67th and then the 50th Illinois Infantry, and in 1870 he started selling seeds off the family farm. Two years later he moved the business into Rockford. His catalogues promised "Good Seeds Cheap," and his covers called him The Pioneer American Seedsman. The family story goes that his mother was a first cousin of Horace Greeley, and the story told about his 1887 catalogue is that his workers put in sixteen-hour days during the spring rush and his own family eighteen: "Are we not surely knights at labor?"

By 1905 he was paying the highest personal property tax in Rockford, and that year he gave the city the land of his original business on East State Street for a farmers' market. Rockford still calls it the Shumway Market. The war had left him deaf, and in the last days of 1925, walking home from the seed company, he was hit by a car he never heard coming. By then his company was counted among the largest seed houses in the world.

🏙️ Rockford, the Seed Town

Rockford was a seed town. Buckbee, Haskell, Alneer, Condon and Shumway all worked out of it. Shumway's son Ray ran the business until he died in 1933, and then the Condon family, Rockford seedsmen themselves, bought it and kept the Shumway name. In 1948 the Rockford paper reported two million catalogues going out in one season, half Condon and half Shumway. Shumway sold three ways: by mail, wholesale, and in packet racks in grocery and hardware stores. When these were printed in 1977, Shumway was still working out of the Condon building on Cedar Street. Leonard Condon remembered that the ground there had been an Irish shanty settlement called Tipperary Patch. Shumway moved out in 1984, and today the name belongs to Jung Seed of Randolph, Wisconsin.

🖨️ The Picture

The aster picture came from Schmidt Lithograph of San Francisco. Max Schmidt went out on his own in 1872 with $18 saved after Korbel Bros., the cigar box makers, let him go. His company sold numbered stock pictures to seed houses all over the country, and in the family's own words they just reprinted the name on the bottom. That's why the same No. 1324 aster turns up with other seedsmen's names on it, and why R. H. Shumway Seedsman is printed right over the flower.

📏 Details

• Vintage 1970s R. H. Shumway Seedsman aster seed packet, Heart of France - Red
• Schmidt Litho stock picture No. 1324, run code 77 on the back
• Rockford, Illinois, Established 1870
• About 5" x 3 1/2", never filled, New Old Stock
• You'll get one packet like the ones shown

🖼️ It looks great framed in a kitchen, a potting shed or a garden room, and it's a fun one for anybody who collects Rockford or Illinois history.