This exquisite photo is from my friend, Alan Wildblood who is a researcher par excellence. How I would love to enter the front door of that old shop and buy a few cigars! Alan is a Trentonian whose career carried him to Germany. If anyone has any information on the Wildblood family, I'm sure Alan would appreciate hearing from you. Contact him at www.wildblood.org. An email from Alan describes in detail the photo.
Alan writes:
The tobacco distributor, which the family called a "sponge store," was on North Clinton Avenue at Oak Street. The number was 236 in 1900, but before 1920 it was renumbered 346. The enterprise was the forerunner of Lee Wildblood Company, Potters Tools, established 1898. Frederick Wildblood and Hannah née Walklett, from Burslem, Staffordshire, married in England. Their immigrant son Arthur Wildblood became Trenton Potteries plant superintendent nearly across the street from the store. My father, Harold, was born in the old East Trenton homestead in 1913. He was a 1930 "general business" graduate of Trenton High School - THS, not TCHS, I have a spoon from the cafeteria to prove it - and Rider College night school. Young Harold had to hide his typewritter from grandmother Hannah and type softly because she thought the newfangled gadget was the devil's tool. Fred and Hannah are buried in Greenwood Cemetery. They are my great-grandparents. Their son Lee, who died in 1962 at 341 Hobart Avenue, was my grandfather. Sponges were used in the manufacture of sanitary ware to clean the work in progress.
Alan
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