Lewis Gahre, Umbrellas and Parasols
c. 1885
Address unknown
Minneapolis, Minn.
Image: @mnhs

I’m imagining the scene:

Photographer: Let’s have you stand in front of the shop.

Gahre: OK. (nervously) Look, I don’t want to tell you how to do your job or anything, but what if I like, hold an umbrella or something?

Photographer: Go for it.

Gahre: (beams, runs into shop)

I can’t find anything else about Mr. Gahre, but I *can* tell you that peak-parasol in Minneapolis, as suggested by appearance counts of the word In the Minneapolis Star Tribune archive, was probably 1906. (Minneapolis Journal, Sunday, May 20, p. 48)

Update! Not sure, but some searching suggests the location of the photo atop this thread was *not* Minneapolis but possibly 34-8 South Laurel St., Bridgeton, NJ, sometime pre-1883.

Hi there @CumbCoHistSoc — any suggestions for searching old Bridgeton street views online?

Mr. Gahre, I have you covered.

A major break in this lesser-known Umbrella Man mystery is forthcoming — involving Germany, an entirely different building and, of all people, Oscar Wilde.

And Minneapolis? We shall see...

UPDATE: Let’s start at the end.

The “whole-souled, honest and universally liked” umbrella man Lewis Gahre (referenced as “Louis” in places) died at Bridgeton, NJ, on Nov. 29, 1883.

Sources: West-Jersey (Bridgeton) Pioneer, 12-6-83 (Library of Congress); http://findagrave.com 

(Aside: It looks like bottles from his bottling business — which his son Christian looks to have run for a while — come up for sale/auction routinely, and they are cool.)

Image: New Jersey Bottles Forum ( http://njbottles.com )

Anyway. All of this would seem to establish the location of the photo as Bridgeton, New Jersey, right?

Just need to find a second 19th c. photo locating this same building at Bridgeton to ice it.

Easy. Let’s go find it.

So where in Bridgeton was Gahre’s umbrella shop?

An 1881-2 county directory (Google Books) lists it, just below an ad for the bottling business.

Gahre did his practical making of umbrellas and parasols on S. Laurel. If I read it right, the shop was at 36, his home at 38.

Immediately to Google Street View!

Longshot: Did that that wood-frame building happen to survive the decades?

Sigh. Sure doesn’t look like it.

Gonna have to look elsewhere.

Good news is late 19th-c. Bridgeton was well-photographed, judging by the scores of postcard views available online. Like this one depicting some stretch of Laurel. (eBay)

But I couldn’t find the Gahre shop building...

... and it was at this very impasse where the path took a turn, thanks to a poorly received and mostly forgotten 1882 lecture by Oscar Wilde.

In Googling around about S. Laurel Street in Bridgeton, see, I ran across a post by historian and Wilde expert John Cooper from his blog “Oscar Wilde in America.”

(It’s where I found the clip in the previous tweet.) https://oscarwildeinamerica.blog 

Cooper’s website/blog is a vast clearinghouse for Wilde’s 1882 U.S./Canada lecture tour.

Wilde gave 141 talks (including two in St. Paul and one in Minneapolis). The post I found, from about a year ago, was about a newly discovered lecture — the tour’s penultimate. In Bridgeton.

Wilde didn’t go over well, apparently. Cooper’s details are fun reading.

But what caught my eye in the post was this exterior shot of Wilde’s Bridgeton lecture venue: Moore’s Music Hall.

On South Laurel Street, you say?

What’s that on the far left?

http://oscarwildeinamerica.blog/2019/09/03/bridgeton-nj/

Got it! Open and shut, as they say in the umbrella biz. Moore’s Music Hall, I found, was the adjacent address.

I can’t help but imagine a tour-weary Oscar Wilde, pre- or post-lecture, pausing next door to talk umbrellas and design fineries with fellow his aesthete Lewis Gahre.

So how might this photo have been associated with Minneapolis?

Unclear. One fun possibility: Gahre’s grandson Frank (1870-1948) left NJ for the Univ. of Minnesota and stayed. (Google Books)

Did he take with him a whimsical photo of his umbrella-toting grandfather? Maybe so.

Fin.

Addendum: Missing this thread already, I checked the 11-2-1883 West-Jersey Pioneer’s accounts of the lecture for any mention of Oscar Wilde seen umbrella shopping while in Bridgeton.

Nothing, sadly.

Another shopkeeper was inspired however.

Addendum 2: I forgot to mention that @mnhs holds a portrait of Frank and a half-dozen or so others of his immediate family — none of which include umbrellas.

Frank Henry Gahre, Minneapolis. President
Bordwell-Robinson Sash & Door Co.
c. 1925

Addendum 3: One more data point corroborating that sliver of Gahre’s umbrella shop in the Oscar Wilde venue photo — the 2-28-1884 Pioneer places ”Louis Gahre’s old stand, next to Moore’s opera house.”

And yes, I’m now going to look for a photo of M.C. English’s Fruit Store....