Historic Hood River

Notes

Here’s Grace’s museum artifact to start the week:

Manufactured in the 1890s, this bottle was designed by Herman Tappan of the Tappan Perfume Company, then based at 112 Duane Street in New York City. Originally known as the Corning & Tappan Perfume Company, it became one of the most prominent American perfumeries of the Victorian era, offering affordable fragrances marketed to middle-class buyers.

The floral scent inside this particular bottle was called Sweet Bye and Bye. Because much of the product’s marketing features illustrations of lilies, we can guess that they were likely one of the fragrance’s main notes. The Tappan Perfume Company was known for its novelty figural glass bottles, a style that directly inspired the Avon bottles of the 1960s through the 1980s. While many of Tappan’s scents came in lantern-shaped bottles like this one, they were also shaped like birds, hands, and even baseball bats.

The bottle entered the museum’s collection in 2011, and advertisements for Booth’s Store News in early 1900s issues of the Hood River Glacier frequently mention Tappan products; however, the specific story behind this bottle’s connection to Hood River history remains unknown.

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