115 Years of Family-owned Local Business

Peggy Derrick

Catalog Number: 2005.001.01

If your family has been in this area for a few generations, chances are they paid for some of their clothing at this cash register. Clothing for the whole family was sold at the Salem Markos Store at 313 Pearl St. Your grandpa or great-grandpa might have paid for their Levis here: the Markos Clothing Store is the oldest Levi’s account east of the Mississippi (since 1921), and has specialized in jeans for a long time.

This nickel-plated National cash register dates to circa 1912, and that places it almost at the 1911 beginning of the story of the Markos family in La Crosse. Their story actually began in their homeland of Syria. In 1901 five Markos brothers immigrated to the U.S., and two of them started a business in Rochester, Pennsylvania. Salem and Charles Markos owned the business, and the others helped run it. The store supplied the goods for the brothers to peddle across the countryside, a tradition with deep historic roots, but which has now completely disappeared in this country.  The growth of both mail-order catalogs and automobile ownership helped to make the peddler’s services superfluous.

In 1911 Salem Markos moved the business to La Crosse. Besides the retail business, he supplied peddlers all over the country who bought their goods wholesale from him. First his brothers, and later his sons helped in the business, and in 1926 they became Salem Markos & Sons. That was the same year they moved to the 313 Pearl St. location that they would inhabit for the next 87 years, until the present owner, Richard Markos, moved the store to 303 Pearl St.

Today you can still buy quality brand-name clothing in the family-owned store, but you can’t watch them put your money in this elegant cash register. It has been donated to the La Crosse County Historical Society by the Markos family.  After all, it doesn’t take credit cards.

This article was originally featured in the La Crosse Tribune on June 11, 2016.

This object can be viewed in our online collections database by clicking here.

Hmong Story Cloths: A Not So Traditional Tradition

Peggy Derrick

Catalog Number: 2015.014.036       

It has been approximately 40 years since Hmong people began to relocate from refugee camps in Thailand to La Crosse. In the aftermath of the Vietnam War thousands of Hmong were forced to flee Laos, and spent many years in the camps. There they recreated their village life as best they could, continuing traditional ways of living, including the production of fabric and decorative needlework called Paj ntaub, or flower cloth. Skilled craftswomen, using little more than needle, scissors and thread, created intricate masterpieces of embroidery and reverse applique to decorate clothing with traditional abstract designs.

Yet here in North America the most immediately recognizable Hmong needlework is something quite different: these are the “story cloths,” filled with recognizable imagery of people and animals, often engaged in activities that are part of a narrative, or story. The stories are filled with scenes of traditional Hmong village life and dangerous escapes from soldiers chasing them through the jungle and across the Mekong River to safety in Thailand. Some include the next chapter in their lives, a journey by airplane to the U.S.A. and life in a strange new place with more cars than animals, potatoes instead of rice, and English instead of the Hmong language. And where a market economy replaced traditional village economy.

It turns out that these story cloths are a part of that process of learning to survive in their new environment. New styles of Paj ntaub were developed to be sold to tourists in Thailand and to Americans in the U.S. No one knows exactly who made the first narrative story cloth, but it is often said that it was a man who first drew the figures on a cloth for women to embroider, and it is true that it became a man’s job, while women did the actual embroidery. The soft blue or grey backgrounds are said to have been chosen to appeal to Western tastes.

Apparently both the colors and the stories have been very appealing because these story cloths became extremely popular. They were made both in the camps and in the United States for sale on the market. They vary in size from very small—this one is 15” by 16.5,” to several feet in both dimensions. They can include hundreds of small figures engaged in activities ranging from feeding chickens and pigs, to hunting tigers, to crossing the Mekong on rafts, to flying in jumbo jets.

This little story cloth belonged to Betty Weeth, a resident of La Crosse who worked with social agencies to facilitate the resettlement process for the first Hmong people to make La Crosse their new home. It is easy to imagine that it was made by a person feeling homesick, with imagery restricted to domestic activities the new residents must have missed from their homeland: feeding livestock, processing their rice crop by hand, and weaving at an upright loom.

The story cloth is an object caught in a moment in history: it filled a need at a specific time in the history of the Hmong people, but as younger generations assimilate, fewer women will engage in needlework. Story cloths may cease to be made, or they may tell different stories as the story of the Hmong people unfolds.

This article was originally published in the La Crosse Tribune on June 4th, 2016.

This object can be viewed in our online collections database by clicking here.

Taking a Turkish Bath in La Crosse

Caroline C. Morris

Many decades ago, a grandson of Alice Green Hixon, owner of the Hixon House at 429 7th St. N, decided to disobey his grandmother. The stately Alice Green Hixon had forbidden her grandchildren to go down into the basement, but – being a child – he made a point of exploring it. Among the antique household accoutrements in the dark basement, he stumbled on this wooden contraption that must have seemed like it fell out of a science fiction novel. More likely, this “Turkish Bath Cabinet” came via a doctor’s recommendation.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it was fashionable to take “vapor baths” or “steam baths” in wooden cabinets. To warm yourself up, you put a scoopful of hot coals in the perforated metal “mug” on the floor of the box, next to a shallow dish of water to occasionally splash on the mug to make steam. Then strip down to your skivvies, step inside, make yourself comfortable on the cane-bottomed seat, and have an accomplice shut the door for you. A half-hour in the box could cure “La Grippe, Colds, Liver, Kidney, Blood and Skin Diseases, and Rheumatism,” claimed advertisements of the era.[1]

By the turn of the century, Americans were increasingly health-conscious; partly because the Industrial Revolution had introduced a host of new afflictions (particularly respiratory illnesses), and partly because new scientific discoveries seemed to offer hope. Why not give the latest “treatment” a try if it might increase your quality of life?

[1] Turkish Bath Cabinet,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle (Nov. 1, 1899): 9.

This article was originally published in the La Crosse Tribune on May 28 ,2016.