Both the image and the product name on the metal tin poster surprised me.
The tin featured a young black girl wearing a clean dress with a white pinafore, and a bright smile. She had red lips shaped by lipstick – unlike the more common grotesque images of black children of that era. She did have the more common elements prescribed to black females: The kerchief on her head and the spoon and bowl in her hands branded her as a domestic.
The tin was hanging on a wall recently at an auction house, and someone had already left an absentee bid. It advertised “Aunt Sally’s Pancake Flour,” which I had never heard of. Her counterpart, Aunt Jemima, was known the world over, and that image was universally loathed because of the “mammy” image it projected.
This Aunt Sally was also one of those images, but a bit more refined. The tin was a reproduction made in 1993 by a sign company in Ohio, but I could not find an original of it on the web. So, I’m not sure if it was ever used by the R.W. Faucett Mill of St. Joseph, MO, to sell its pancake flour in the 1890s.
Faucett’s choice of name wasn’t original. “Aunt Sally” had been used as an advertising symbol since prior to 1875 on baking powder cans. She was one of several images of black domestics that were (and still are) used to sell products (remember those Cream of Wheat ads with the black chef).
Aunt Jemima the person was the brainchild of R.T. Davis, who bought the Aunt Jemima company, its recipe and trademark in 1890. He improved the recipe and advertised it as the first complete instant pancake flour. Davis competed at the time with Faucett, his former business partner.
Their newspaper ads ran side by side with the same prices, and when one dropped his price, the other followed.
To get ahead of his competitor, Davis realized that his product had to be different. So, he started searching the country for a real Aunt Jemima, a woman with “Southern charm, and lots of personality.” He found her in a woman named Nancy Green, a former slave born in 1834 in Kentucky, who was then working as a housekeeper in Chicago.
She was introduced at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893, working out of a huge (24 x 12 foot) flour barrel, entertaining fair-goers with songs and stories from the old days while demonstrating how to make pancakes. She was a hit and the rest is history: the ubiquitous image of a black “mammy” wearing a kerchief on a pancake box. Green died in a car crash in 1923, and was replaced by other black women posing as Aunt Jemima, whose image changed over the years. (Descendants of the women sued the current owner, Quaker Oats, in 2014 for a share of revenues.)
I didn’t find any mention via Google that Faucett set up a booth at the fair. But in 1895, he advertised his pancakes in a log cabin at a month-long food exhibit at Madison Square Garden in New York. The exhibits included demonstration kitchens.
“What pretty girls, brightly trimmed booths, brilliant lighting, and a very fair orchestra could accomplish in making that vulgar thing, food, attractive to the masses, was not wanting in quantity and kind,” according to an article in a trade magazine for businessmen. The article noted that 5,000 of the “right class of people” showed up daily.
Aunt Jemima and Aunt Sally’s were not the only instant pancake-flour makers. A trade publication from the early 1900s listed other companies, including Uncle Tom’s Pancake Flour, Uncle Jerry’s Pancake Flour and Hoosier Pancake Flour.
