Now who is this Dr. Chase? In the nineteenth-century manner, Chase earned his fame and fortune with equal parts of hard work and self-promotion. Born in New York State in 1817, Alvin Chase came to Ann Arbor in 1856 to pursue a medical degree after a career as a traveling peddler of groceries and...
Dan Bruce, our Curator, bought this little booklet to complement our patent medicine collection. It doesn’t have a publication date but there’s a rudimentary ‘Baby Book’ with a place for a picture and some birth statistics. Written in pencil is the notation that Our Baby was born March 19th,...
I have always liked arrowroot biscuits but I didn’t realize the history behind them until I started researching the museum’s can of Montserrat’s Arrowroot. Arrowroot has a long history of cultivation in the Caribbean as a food staple. Arrowroot thickens at a lower temperature than does flour or...