LeRoy Pennysaver & News

LE ROY PENNYSAVER & NEWS - SEPTEMBER 13, 2020 by Lynne Belluscio There is a museum south of Toledo, Ohio, called Sauder Village. A year ago, they began building a 1920s streetscape, complete with a fire station, auto garage, movie theater, candy store, barber shop, clothing shop, and grocery store. They contacted the Jell-O Museum because they wanted to have authentic looking Jell-O boxes on the shelves, so we will be sending images for them to recreate the blue and red Jell-O boxes that were sold in the 1920s. But they are also interested in the story of the wooden Jell-O crates that were used to ship Jell-O to stores. (Corrugated cardboard boxes were not used until afterGeneral Foods took over the company in the late 1920s.) Each wooden box contained three dozen 3 ¼ ounce individual boxes of Jell-O, and according to descriptions, each dozen was packaged in a separate white cardboard box. The Jell-O Museum has acquired many wooden Jell-O boxes, and some are marked “Genesee Pure Food Company.” Some are marked “Jell-O Company.” And some are marked “Postum – successor to the Jell-O Company.” So far, I’mnot sure where the wooden boxes were manufactured. They certainly had to arrive in LeRoy by the boxcar load. The special corner construction sometimes known as box joints, were also used on the early wooden Kodak box cameras. In fact, when we had Jell-O boxes reproduced twenty years ago, they were made by a small company in Batavia that had purchased old equipment that had been used to make the wooden Kodak box cameras. The wooden Jell-O boxes were so popular that store keepers, would sell them for a quarter. Folks used the boxes to make a variety of projects from fishing tackle boxes, tool boxes, and wagons. I’m always on the lookout for Jell-O box projects. One of the boxes on display in the museum , was made into a single tube radio (and it still works!) Recently I purchased a box on Ebay, that was made out of two Jell-O boxes with a flip lid and a drawer inside. The iconic wooden Jell-O box was also featured in several Jell-O advertisements. There is an image of a wooden box that fell out of the back of a Jell-O wagon onto the railroad tracks and a man is running to pick the box up before the train comes. Another ad shows a little boy with a wooden Jell-O box wrapped with a red ribbon for a present. This past spring, our bus trip was to visit Sauder Village to see their great quilt show, and of course that was canceled, but perhaps this next spring, we will be able to visit Sauder Village and go to the quilt show and visit their 1920s street and go into the store and see the Jell-O display. Wooden Jell-O Boxes Saturday September 20th, 2020