Thanksgiving, 1897
The Grandon Hotel in Helena, Montana selected a menu with a melodramatic scene on the cover for its Thanksgiving dinner in 1897. In a staged photograph, a well-dressed couple brings a basket of food for a poor wretch in the depths of despair. It was an image that foreshadowed the imminent arrival of the silent movie.
When the hotel opened in 1885, the Grandon was one of the best hotels in town, distinguished by a single granite column which supported its northeast bay. Helena was then a wealthy mining town, but by the time of this dinner in 1897, the gold had run out in nearby Last Chance Gulch, and the small town of 12,000 carried on more simply as the state capital.
The menu shown below begins with oysters. Delivered daily by the Northern Pacific Railroad, the Blue Points were shelled on the Eastern Seaboard, before being packed in milk containers and shipped westward. After completing their 2,200-mile journey to Helena, the oysters were placed back on the half shells and served. This ritual was performed each day in small towns across the country. In the late nineteenth century, Americans were crazy about oysters, the U.S. government reporting that per capita consumption had reached 660 oysters per year, well ahead of the United Kingdom and France, where only 120 and 26 oysters were eaten by its citizens each year, respectively. There are a number of fancy dishes on this menu, including Green Turtle Soup, Caviar, Planked Whitefish, Broiled Quail, Braized (sic) Sweetbreads, Haunch of Venison, and Banana Fritters’ Glace au Rum.
This bill of fare was printed on a blank card produced by the C. E. Morrell Company of Elmira, New York. The artistic grouping of costumed participants, called a “tableau” (short for the French term tableau vivant, meaning “living picture”) had roots in photography going back to the 1840s when subjects needed to remain motionless for minutes to accommodate the long exposure times. The tableau was also employed in many types of entertainment, ranging from small parties to grand balls, and even used in theater productions when actors held a pose in a quiet display at the end of an act. However, the photograph on this menu cover captures a dynamic moment of a drama, making it look more like a movie still than a traditional tableau. In 1897, motion pictures were still a novelty, often made in one shot and shown in penny arcades. However things were about to change. Over the next ten years, four thousand small cinemas called “nickelodeons” opened across the country, marking the beginning of the movie industry.
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