In the Heart of Wichita

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Note: this is the second installment in a series about the Seth Crocker Pen Company and its connection with the George Innes Company.  To start at the beginning, the first installment can be found at https://leadheadpencils.blogspot.com/2018/02/with-surgical-precision.html.

What a difference seven years makes.

Seven years ago, after piddling around online for enough time that I wish I had it back, I scoured the internet trying to figure out whether the imprint on this pencil, “The Geo. Innes Co.,” was a manufacturer’s imprint or an advertising imprint:

In yesterday’s installment, David Nishimura helped me to establish conclusively that this pencil was made by the Seth Crocker Pen Company.  The question remains, though, what significance the George Innes Company bears on all this.

Seven years later, I sat back in front of a newer computer, with vastly enhanced research materials available on the internet, and I’ve found an answer that fits perfectly into a missing gap in the Seth Crocker story.

The answer at first seems highly unlikely . . . The George Innes Dry Goods Warehouse was first established in Wichita, Kansas, in 1897:

“In the Heart of Wichita,” was the company’s catchphrase:

The store included not only dry goods, but other departments as well.  Here’s a shot inside, from the 1890s, courtesy of the Wichita-Sedgwick County Historical Museum:

In 1937, the Innes Department Store opened in downtown Wichita:

That’s at almost exactly the right time the Seth Crocker pens like David’s and my pencil marked “The Geo. Innes Co.” were made.

So is this an advertiser or a rebadged store brand?  Well, when Parker made pens for Sears, marked with the department store’s Diamond Medal name, it’s considered a rebadge - particularly in light of the fact that more than one company (or manufacturer) made them for the store (which was, in my lexicon, the producer).  The same can be said for Eversharp, Waterman and Sheaffer, each of which made Gold Bond pens for Montgomery Ward.

I haven’t seen any advertisements for Innes pens, but somewhere in Wichita I would bet they are out there.   I do not believe this was an advertising pencil or a “property of” pencil, but one which was manufactured on order for the Innes Department Store for resale as a house brand.

There’s more.

By the 1950s, Innes Department Store advertisements included a subtitle: “a Macy store”:

Eventually, the signage on the venerable downtown location was changed over to reflect new ownership:

What is odd is that I cannot find one shred of information to indicate when Macy’s purchased Innes.  Since Macy’s operated the store under the Innes name, the buyer clearly understood the good will value of the Innes name, so how long the store was operated under Macy’s secret ownership is, as of the writing of this article, unknown. For all we know, the Innes Department Store might have been a Macy's subsidiary when it decided to move into a very Macy's-like building in 1937.

And now, as Paul Harvey used to say, I’m going to tell you the rest of the story.

One of the only things I knew about the Seth Crocker Pen Company when I last wrote about it in 2014 was this detail:

“From some discussion online, it looks like Seth Crocker may have made storebrand pens for companies including R. H. Macy.”