the golden rule

About 1908, Fred Brewer opened a variety store in De Smet, on the same lot where Mr. Power's tailor shop had once been located on the west side of Calumet. Tay Pay had sold his town property in 1886 and left for Ireland, perhaps in a huff over Mrs. Power's decision to build a house on Second Street and live in it. After a few months, however, Mr. Power returned to both De Smet and tailoring (and, one assumes, to Mrs. Power); he died in 1901.

Brewer's variety store was called The Golden Rule, and it is shown left of center in the above 1911 photograph. Brewer's name and the store name appear on the sign (trust me). To the right is the office of Dr. E. Gomer Davies (the one with the large light-colored awning), then a bit of the Loftus Store. To the left, you can see Charles Tinkham's furniture store, with the living quarters above. It was here that Laura Ingalls and Mary Power attended their first church sociable (see Little Town on the Prairie, Chapter 17).

Today, there are vacant lots where the furniture store and tailor shop once were. De Smet Flowers and Gifts is where the doctor's office was; the Loftus Store is still standing.

Was the tailor shop torn down prior to the above photo, or was The Golden Rule housed in the building from the 1880s?

If you look carefully at the photo above (you can really zoom in if you download the first biggie panoramic photograph of De Smet town buildings at the American Memory collection from the Library of Congress HERE; search for "De Smet, South Dakota"), you can see that the variety store seems to have quite the interesting facade. I haven't been able to draw it to make sense to me. It's almost like an optical illusion, it confuses me so. Where exactly was the door? The front wall? Are those stairs I see? Or was there merchandise on display out front that blocks part of the one step up to the door?


The only other place I can detect a funky facade along that part of Calumet is in the 1883 bird's-eye view of De Smet, a bit of which is shown above. The entire view can be found in John Miller's Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little Town, pages 20-21. Of course, we all know that drawing isn't all that accurate, and even Miller mentions the period newspaper article complaining that it left out piles of trash and a dead cow, among other things, but it was drawn remarkably well to have been done without benefit of flying over and taking a picture. Is that facade (I colored it yellow) all on the Power lot or the one next door? Is it supposed to represent two buildings on one lot? HERE is something else I saved while fooling around with it.

Maybe it's just a case of bad drafting, or maybe J.J. Stoner figured the funky tailor shop entrance would never be noticed on a trotting horse, but I've spent way too many hours of too many days wondering if the Brewer building and the Power building might be one and the same. It's definitely time for me to move on to the next tangent.
- posted by pioneergirl at 6:16 PM