Greenwood · 4 August 1898
Sam Lee advertises laundry services
Image unavailable. The passage, citation and archive link remain available.
The Commonwealth, 1898-08-04, page sequence 5. Library of Congress, Chronicling America. https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn89065008/1898-08-04/ed-1/?sp=5
Open the original at the archive ↗Advertisement transcription
SAM LEE’S CHINESE LAUNDRY Can do your work equal to that done at Birmingham and St. Louis. Prices Same. Work Guaranteed. Drummers’ work sent in in the morning returned same day. Laundry near Postoffie.
The first of the two settings in this series: work equal to Birmingham and St. Louis, the same prices, a guarantee, drummers’ work back the same day, and a laundry near the post office.
Reading limits
editorial image reading of this printing, 13 September 2026; no independent human or community review.
One printing, saved as an image. The dates in this series show when an appearance was saved, not that the laundry traded continuously, and not a complete survey of the paper.
First setting of this advertisement, read from this printing on 13 September 2026. Clean impression; every line legible.
The same setting stands in 14 of the 43 saved appearances; the reading below is the reading of that setting, verified against this image.
The landmark line is set in upper and lower case behind a pointing-hand ornament, and the last word is printed “Postoffie”. The ornament is omitted here and the spelling is left as printed.
Line breaks inside a sentence are joined; the compositor’s end-of-line hyphen in “morn-/ing” is closed up; apostrophes are normalised.
The boxes drawn on this image are approximate guides to the lines, positioned by eye, not OCR coordinates.
- Transcription
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Source guide
What does this advertisement actually promise?
Three things: work as good as work done in two larger cities, the same prices as those cities, and a guarantee. It promises a standard of work. It does not record a single customer, price list, or completed job.
Does this show that laundry sent in the morning really came back the same day?
No. This is the laundry's own offer to travelling salesmen, printed in a paid advertisement. Nothing here records what was returned, when, or to whom. An advertised promise is evidence of what was promised.
Not from this source: “Drummers” were travelling salesmen, who needed clean linen between trains. That definition comes from general usage of the period, not from this advertisement.
Where was the laundry?
The advertisement gives a landmark, not an address: near the post office. It is enough to find the shop if you already know the town, and it is not a street number that can be placed on a map.