Information Sheet

 

 

R         Southeast Missouri Drummers’ Association.

1183                Souvenir programs, 1908, 1918.

                                    Two volumes.

 

MICROFILM

 

 

These are souvenir programs for the twelfth (1908) and twenty-second (1918) annual meetings of the Southeast Missouri Drummers’ Association, held at Sainte Genevieve in Sainte Genevieve County, Missouri.  The programs feature schedules of events, descriptions of Sainte Genevieve, its prominent citizens, and local businesses, photographs of members of the associa­tion, its officers, and city officials, and views of public buildings, businesses, and residences.

 

According to the history of the association in the souvenir program for 1908, the Southeast Missouri Drummers’ Association was a commercial organization of traveling salesmen (known as “drummers”) and commercial agents working in southeastern Missouri.  It was organized at Cape Girardeau in 1896 as the Southeast Missouri Drummers’ Baseball and Entertainment Association.  The object was social, “to bring together and more closely unite the traveling men….our friends and our customers.”  The underlying motive was to strengthen the commercial relationships be­tween the representatives of the large St. Louis and Memphis wholesale houses and the local mer­chants and customers of the region by annual meetings at various locations in the region.

 

The first annual meeting was held at Cape Girardeau on 10 May 1897 and featured a base­ball game between the drummers and local merchants.   Sometime soon afterward the baseball game seems to have been dropped as the primary feature of the meetings, and the name was changed to reflect the actual composition of the association.  Subsequent annual meetings were held at Cape Girardeau, Farmington, Poplar Bluff, Sainte Genevieve, and Sikeston, and the grand event of the occasion was the “Dress Parade” in which the drummers, dressed in white suits with red and green neckties and umbrellas, marched down the main street of the host city.  Other fea­tures of the annual meetings were banquets, musical entertainment, exhibitions, and sporting con­tests.

 

The 1908 activities in Sainte Genevieve on 28-30 May included a concert by the Depot Army Band from Jefferson Barracks and a minstrel show.   Among local businesses noted were Meyer’s Hotel, City Hotel, Jokerst-Yealy Mercantile Co., Rozier’s stores in Sainte Genevieve, St. Marys, and Perryville, Western Lime Works, John W. Roth Implement House, and Ste. Genevieve Lime and Quarry Works.

 

The 1918 festivities, held on 23-25 May, featured Noel Poepping’s band from St. Louis and a “Mammoth Red Cross Benefit” on 24 May.  A list of the meeting places through 1917 is on page 5.  A recapitulation of the 1917 meeting at De Soto is on pages 43 and 45, and “Ste. Genevieve, the Maternal City of Missouri” begins on page 51.  Advertising by many of the dominant firms in the regional trade subsidized the printing of the programs.  An insert to the 1918 program indicates W. J. (William J.) Riley was the author and editor of the association’s programs.

 

 

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