1917-1920 – Sales letter and 13 photographs of Sunnyside Apiaries, a large, single-owner beekeeping business in Montana

Fromberg, Montana, 1920. Unbound. Very good. The one-page sales letter (appears to be a retained copy) is on Sunnyside Apiaries letterhead and dated October 9th, 1917. It is from B. F. (Benjamin Franklin) Smith at Fromberg, Montana, a small community near Billings. It reads in part:

“Your favor of Oct 5th enclosing $600.00 check at hand. We are rushing everything to get this [box]car moving . . . in two weeks. [What] I have to do . . . is to buy up small lots from little producers and do the grading myself and also haul the honey. . .. I have put in five big days with myself and my truck hauling some of it 20 miles and have picked up 200 cases. Tomorrow I leave for Powell Wyo to get 150 cases more, this will be 55 miles but all I will have to do will be inspect as it is from members of the Assn. Another 150 cases will be ready in 10 days. . .. We have to stamp it with our stamp and part of it furnish the cases, so the advance . . . will not begin to pay half of the extra expense. . .. We have maybe 45 to 50 cases of extracted and this will make about 1,000 cases of comb.”

All of the vernacular photographs are approximately 5.5” x 5”. Four are real photograph postcards (RPPCs). One photo is dated August 31, 1920, on the reverse. All are in nice shape; one is slightly out of focus. They show: the business truck with signage, a person tending chickens, and eleven others showing the hives, a honey house, ancillary buildings, and railroad tracks.

. Smith was born in 1874 and married Almira Jane Coe, and together they had two children. He was a prominent apiarist and president of the Montana Beekeepers’ Association. He died in a railroad accident in 1928, when his car was struck by a locomotive at a crossing near his home and the apiary.

(For more information, see newspaper and genealogical articles about Benjamin Franklin Smith.)

Quite scarce. At the time of listing, nothing similar is for sale in the trade. The rare book shows nothing similar has appeared at auction. OCLC shows several institutions hold singular photographs of apiaries and apiarists, but only one holds a similar collection of photographs, without any sales letters.

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