What follows on this page and in the dated links below is an abbreviated version of my full original PDF file with pictures which can be downloaded here.
Link to Excel document for Timeline for Allen and Smith.
THE STORY OF MY PATERNAL GRANDPARENTS, ALICE JUILA SMITH AND LAMBETH SHELTON ALLEN, SR., unfolding over one hundred eleven years and twelve days, from November 13, 1876, to November 25, 1987.
The years of Lambeth’s and Alice’s lives saw an incredible explosion of innovations and inventions.
- The first telephone call from Alexander Graham Bell to his assistant Thomas A. Watson in the adjoining room1 was made the year Lambeth was born. By 1920, when Lambeth was 44 and Alice was 20, 65% of American homes were yet to have telephones.2 But by 1987, the year Alice died, mobile phone use was ready to skyrocket with the introduction of the Nokia and 2G network.3
- The first home in the United States to have electric lights, powered by hydroelectricity, was in 18826, the year Lambeth turned six and the parents of Alice were only ten. Even up until 1925, three years after Lambeth and Alice were married, half the homes in the United States still did not have electricity.6
- The Model-T automobile, which put “Americans on wheels”4, wasn’t introduced until 1908, the year Lambeth turned 32 and Alice turned eight. For many years after roads were still not paved and travel by car between major cities was difficult. It wasn’t until 1938, when Lambeth was 62 and Alice was 38, that Route 66 became the first intrastate highway in the United States to become completely paved from Chicago to Los Angeles.5
- The Wright brothers didn’t make their first successful flight at Kitty Hawk7 until the year Lambeth turned twenty-seven and Alice turned three, yet during their lives Lambeth would fly in an airplane from Chicago to Florida and Alice would not only fly to many places around the country but would also witness man’s first walk on the moon and the launch of the space shuttle program in the United States.
Because of these amazing technological advances and other remarkable changes throughout their lives I have included certain historical information, both chronologically and in the comparison below, which either bear significance to interests Lambeth and Alice had or show how the world around them was progressing. While remarkable, the fast pace of these changes undoubtedly also led to the sentiment Alice had towards the end of her life of feeling that she did not “belong here anymore!”
There were other events during the lifespans of Lambeth and Alice that were not so positive. They both lived through two world wars and the development of “weapons of mass destruction”. Alice also lived through the Cold War, and the Korean and Vietnam Conflicts. Included in the chronology is narrative from the memoirs of their daughter, Nancy, who was a college student during the second world war and which, although written from her perspective, does help to show how their everyday lives, and the lives of average citizens in the United States, were affected by that war in particular.
1https://www.history.com/topics/inventions/alexander-graham-bell, 2https://www.statista.com/statistics/189959/housing-units-with-telephones-in-the-united-states-since-1920/. 3https://www.practicallynetworked.com/history-of-the-cell-phone/, 4https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/business/2002/09/01/1926-ford-model-t-sports-touring-car/810e313f-4370-44b7-bb76-3282f9de945e/, 5https://www.route66world.com/66_history, 6https://mrelectric.com/blog/the-history-of-electricity-history-of-electricity-timeline, 7https://www.britannica.com/biography/Wright-brothers
Inspiration for the following time comparison, adapted to fit the lifespan of Lambeth and Alice, is from a chart in the memoirs of Nancy Ellen Allen Haeger which she called “20th Century Time Warp”. [1876 – the year Lambeth was born, 1900 – the year Alice was born, 1987 – the year Alice died.]
1876 1900 1987
World Population1
1.4 billion 1.6 billion 5 billion
U.S. Population2
(in present day borders)
46.8 million 78.8 million 245 million
U.S. Life Expectancy3
- Years 48 years 74.5 years
U.S. Infant Mortality Rate Per 1,000 Live Births4
326 (Roughly one out of three) 239 (Roughly one out of four) 14
(Representing the number of children born who would die before they reached the age of 5)
1https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/world-population-by-year/, 2https://www.statista.com/statistics/1067138/population-united-states-historical/, 3https://www.statista.com/statistics/1040079/life-expectancy-united-states-all-time/, 4https://www.statista.com/statistics/1041693/united-states-all-time-child-mortality-rate/
Lambeth Shelton Allen, Senior, was born in Missouri in 1876, just eleven years after both the assassination of Abraham Lincoln and the end of the U.S. Civil War. He was my grandfather and I have often thought, since becoming a grandmother myself, if events around my lifetime will seem as far removed to my own grandchildren as the Civil War seems to me. I was born almost seventeen years after the end of World War II and to the school-aged me that war was ancient history, even though we were living on Okinawa where some of the bloodiest fighting had occurred. (My sister, Keren, actually found a cache of bullet casings on the playground of our school! And we were often warned to not pick up anything lying in a field in case it might be a leftover bomb or boobytrap.) To my two oldest grandsons the events of 9/11/01 when the Twin Towers fell in New York City and the war in Iraq that followed, which seem so recent to me, will be in about the same time span from their births as World War II was for me. It’s very strange. As we grow older time seems to go by faster. If you are young and reading this you may not understand, but rest assured, one day you will!
In 1876, the year my grandfather was born, the United States was near the end of the turbulent post-Civil War era known as Reconstruction where the governments and peoples of the Confederate States which had ceded from the Union, as well as newly freed black citizens, were struggling to find their place in the United States. Missouri, where he was born and raised, had been a slave state and although it had not ceded from the Union during the war it had been a “hotly contested border state populated by both Union and Confederate sympathizers. It sent armies, generals, and supplies to both sides, maintained dual governments, and endured a bloody neighbor-against-neighbor intrastate war within the larger national war … By the end of the war in 1865, nearly 110,000 Missourians had served in the Union Army and at least 40,000 in the Confederate Army.”* Lambeth’s Uncle Oliver Pitts, his mother Ellen’s second oldest brother, died fighting for the Confederates and records seem to hint that most likely his Uncle Philip Pitts, another of his mother’s brothers, had gone to Michigan to fight on the side of the Union. Thus, households were divided, relationships irreparably torn apart, and as could be expected, a lifetime, let alone merely eleven years, was not long enough to erase the deep wounds and animosity that the strength of conviction on one side against the other had caused. *https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missouri_in_the_American_Civil_War
The following year in 1877 Reconstruction would end with the withdrawal of the northern Union troops in the former southern Confederate States. What followed was an era for over seventy-five years of legalized segregation and “Jim Crow” laws put in place by the local and state governments.
The concept of separate but equal access to facilities available to the general public became law across the southern United States. Segregation was legally mandated and the right to vote was denied to over 90% of black Americans through the introduction of poll taxes and other laws which restricted them. The overwhelming majority of blacks in the United States continued to reside in the southern states … and the problems being encountered following the end of Reconstruction were not widely known in the north, where the larger cities were more concerned with the issues of immigration and the conditions in the ethnic neighborhoods which immigrants created during the era. https://historycollection.com/this-is-what-life-was-like-during-the-american-gilded-age/
On top of the political and racial turmoil, or perhaps because of it, the U.S. economy was on a downward spiral. By 1877 “three million men, roughly 27 percent of the working population”1, were unemployed. Most of the poverty was felt in the southern states where “Southern whites, especially poorer sharecroppers, blamed the widely spread poverty on the black population and the northerners who had set free the former slaves.”2 1 http://www.fsmitha.com/time/ce19-8.htm, 2 https://historycollection.com/this-is-what-life-was-like-during-the-american-gilded-age/
Yet, the year Lambeth was born was also at the beginning of what would later be dubbed by Mark Twain as “The American Gilded Age”1 which lasted until the early 20th century. Historian Larry Holzworth wrote that the Gilded Age
was a period of rapid change which affected all elements of American life. Cities began to grow upwards as well as outwards. The railroads became the engine of the national economy, which grew to become one of the strongest in the world … Immigration boomed … Electrification of cities and eventually remote rural areas moved at a pace unforeseeable only a few years earlier … American class divides deepened. The wealthy, with no income tax to hinder them, built vast estates while the urban working class struggled to eke out a meager living. A middle class began to emerge … By the end of the Gilded Age the United States was a world power, economically, militarily, and internationally. Here are some of the events and facts about the Gilded Age in the United States …
When the Transcontinental Railroad opened in 1869 it was possible to travel from New York City to San Francisco in the theretofore unheard of time of six days …
Even before the Civil War larger American cities and even some medium size towns were equipped with streetcars, mostly privately owned, which followed their routes on rails, pulled by horses or mules … With electrification … Streetcars and trolleys could then move at higher speeds, and the obvious problems interacting with pedestrians and horse-drawn vehicle quickly presented themselves …
Larger cities began to elevate the tracks above the streets, with elevated station platforms connected to the streets with stairways …
[as was the case with the elevate “El” around the “Loop” in Chicago, the city where Lambeth and Alice met and where Lambeth owned his business].
The railways also expanded outwards from the cities to nearby towns, and dwelling outside of the main business district, able to commute to work by reliable and affordable transportation, became an option for more and more workers and families …
[Lambeth would commute by train to his office in Chicago from the suburb of Glen Ellyn starting in 1926.]
Department stores … became a major factor of American urban life. As a middle class emerged … shopping was the duty of middle class women … Competition among the stores was fierce, and the development of loyal clientele led the stores to provide a variety of services to make them stand out … supported by upscale restaurants and tea rooms.
[Marshall Field’s, the multi-floored high-end department store on the “Loop” in Chicago, became the favorite place for Alice to shop.]
It was during the Gilded Age that the practice of creating lavish Christmas displays in street level windows to celebrate the season (and attract customers) began. By the 1890s many of the displays were animated, and additional displays were prominent within the stores themselves, on all floors, carefully placed to route customers desirous of seeing them past prominently presented merchandise. The downtown shopping districts of all American towns eventually adopted the practice, emulating the larger and well known stores such as … Marshall Field’s.
[Alice would take her children to see these displays and Nancy later recalled “One of our pre-Christmas treats was a trip to Chicago to see the decorated windows in the Marshall Field’s department store – which were animated and different every year. They became very famous and were one of the featured Christmas attractions of the city. The many floors of the store were also lavishly decorated. Marshall Field’s was the department store in Chicago, but particularly spectacular during the month of December! And, naturally, that was where Mother did most of her shopping! … At one Christmas season, Marshall Fields had a special presentation of a fabulous dollhouse owned by screen star, Colleen Moore. I remember standing in line what seemed like a very long time waiting for my chance to see this extraordinarily large miniature house, lavishly furnished, ablaze with lights, and peopled with tiny figures – the daddy, mother, children, a cook, maids, a butler, cars at the front door with a chauffeur, and landscaped with trees, bushes, flower beds and a swimming pool.”]
The emerging middle class during the Gilded Age followed the mores of their cousins, the Victorians across the ocean in London. Despite the protestations of the temperance and suffragette movements, the husband and father was expected to provide a living for his family, the wife and mother was to remain home and supervise the household and the children. As incomes grew, bedroom communities away from the foul air of the city … grew rapidly …
The Gilded Age saw the birth of several well-known consumer products
At the Centennial Exposition [of 1876] in Philadelphia visitors were treated to a new condiment from Pittsburgh, a catsup named Heinz 57. They were able to wash it down with another new product, a beverage made from sassafras root prepared by Hires, and sold as Hires Root Beer. It was during the Gilded Age that John Pemberton began selling Coca-Cola as a patent medicine. In 1879 Cincinnati’s Proctor and Gamble marketed a new soap, which they named Ivory, and which was highly touted by the company for its purity. Kellogg’s patented a process for the manufacturing of Corn Flakes in 1896 and began manufacturing and selling Kellogg’s Corn Flakes that same year.
During the Gilded Age the famed red and white Campbell’s Soup can design was created for its growing line of condensed soups, the colors were inspired by those of Cornell University’s football uniforms. Another product marketed with a red and white label, Budweiser Beer, was introduced in 1876, and served at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. Milton S. Hershey developed his process for making milk chocolate near the end of the Gilded Age, after first achieving considerable success as a manufacturer of caramels. Professional baseball was born in the Gilded Age, and the game exploded in popularity as barnstorming teams began to be replaced with locally based permanent teams playing in organized leagues.2 1 https://www.britannica.com/event/Gilded-Age. 2 https://historycollection.com/this-is-what-life-was-like-during-the-american-gilded-age/
With this background of what America looked like during the early years of my grandparents’ lives, I present the chronology below.
(All text in italics, unless otherwise noted, is directly quoted from the memoirs of their daughter, Nancy Ellen Allen Haeger.)
familyties3.com 