Sperry Flour at the 1894 Midwinter Fair

Primary Source

by Barbara Webster

Sperry-Flour back.jpg

Sperry Flour card from Midwinter Fair, 1894

My grandmother, Elizabeth Lewis Wallace was given four of the ad cards from the 1894 Midwinter Exposition which she, at the age of 16 treasured and kept in perfect shape. The cards were an advertisement for Sperry Flour and featured the buildings at the Expo.

An interesting sideline to this is that in 1907, her uncle, Charles Augustus Bodwell Jr. married Beda Sperry whose father, Austin Sperry established the Sperry Flour Mills in Stockton in 1852.

John Bacon Lewis, the grandfather of Elizabeth, arrived in San Francisco on August 31, 1949. His wife Elizabeth Bodwell Lewis arrived from Connecticut in 1851, and their son Charles Wadsworth Lewis (Elizabeth Lewis Wallace's father) was born in 1853. They remained in San Francisco until 1857 before moving to Petaluma.