Lyman Peabody and the Japanese Tea Craze

What's in a name? Quite a lot if you are a Peabody in Birmingham. There's been many businesses and one still standing fancy house associated with the name. In this episode, we start at the beginning of the Peabody story in Birmingham and the dry goods store that one of the Peabody brothers established in the 1870s. Just why was Lyman importing Japanese tea a big deal and did he have anything to do with Peabody's Restaurant? You'll have to listen to find out.

To access a full episode transcript as well as to access additional material, check out our website.

For questions, concerns, corrections or episode suggestions please reach out to us at museum@bhamgov.org.

Special thanks to the Birmingham Area Cable Board for PEG grant funding that made this podcast possible. Also thanks to past and present staff of the Birmingham Museum, and our amazing volunteers.

Transcript

Lyman Peabody and the Japanese Tea Craze

                Everybody working in the field of history probably has their one historical person or group, source or record that is the bane of their present-day existence. Maybe it’s a past curator with terrible handwriting, maybe it’s an oral historian that doesn’t ask questions you think are interesting, maybe it’s a census taker who doesn’t walk in a straight line, ever, making it impossible to track people down. For me, it’s the Peabody family of Birmingham. For starters: there’s too many of them and too many buildings that they owned. How are these two families related?! Why is it the Ford Peabody mansion, as in two last names, but there’s also a dude named Ford Peabody?! How many times did the restaurant burn down?! How is Ford related to Jim?! But after 9 years at the museum I no longer fear the Peabodies. I have a genealogy and a timeline in front of me and that makes me feel like I can take on anything. So, let’s start close to the beginning of the Peabodies in Birmingham with Lyman Peabody and maybe if you are also confused about the many Peabodies and their buildings, this episode and the next will help you out as well. 

                This is Birmingham Uncovered, a podcast by the Birmingham Museum, where we are exploring the diverse and compelling lives that built Birmingham Michigan into the community that it is today. First, some background on Birmingham: we are a city of approx. 20,000 people over 4.73 square miles, approximately halfway between Detroit and Pontiac in Oakland County. This area was occupied by members of the Three Fires Confederacy of Indigenous People before white settlement in the area started in the late 1810s. Birmingham became a city in 1933 and today is known as a prosperous and multi-faceted community with a thriving cultural scene.

                If you live in or work in Birmingham or just hang out with Birmingham people, you may have heard the Peabody name. Usually it’s in connection with the restaurant that was in business until 2013. And it’s a reasonable assumption that in a smaller city like Birmingham that there was only one main family with the same last name and thus all Peabodies are connected to the restaurant, right?

                Well, kinda but also kinda not really. Our story starts with two brothers: Lyman and James Peabody. Lyman was born in 1836 and James in about 1839 and they were in the middle of the seven sons that Sarah and John Peabody had. John was a farmer and in the 1850 census, 14-year-old Lyman is listed as a “Laborer”. While it seems weird to us today to ask the census taker to record the occupations of all males 14 years old and older, as we’ve covered previously, back in the agrarian economy of the mid 19th century, many children left school in their early teens to work. But the census also asked if everyone in the household had been to school in the last year. Lyman is listed as having attended, along with all his brothers (barring 3-year-old Franklin).

                The Peabody family moved around from census to census but stayed in the general area in between Lake Ontario and Lake Erie in New York. This area of New York was popping at this time and the Peabodies lived within a day or two drive from previous podcast subjects Imri Fish and Rhoda Bingham Daniels. Listen to their podcast episodes to learn more about the social and religious upheavals that were happening in that part of New York at the time.

                Following people through time using the census is better than nothing but leaves us with a lot of personal questions that we simply can’t answer. Like, why did Lyman move to Pennsylvania in the 1860s? We don’t know, but we know that in Conneautville, Pennsylvania in 1865 Lyman and Sarah Foster married and their first child, Hattie, was born in the state as well. Conneautville is in the northwestern part of the state, on the coast of Lake Erie. 

                And another thing, in 1861 James Peabody, Lyman’s brother, enlists in New York to fight in the Civil War. Lyman doesn’t. Why not? We don’t know, but according to the author of the 1898 book “Birmingham: It’s past, present and future”, which had bios on prominent men in town, Lyman’s first business venture was a store in Washington DC during the war. 

                But we do have a clue as to what brought him to the Midwest in the 1870s…oil. When I say “oil boom” you probably think Texas and not Ohio. And I know, I really thought last episode was going to be be the first and only time we mention Ohio this season, but it was not to be. Just another way the Peabody’s are messing with me.

                The first oil well in Ohio was drilled in 1859 and by 1883 Ohio ranked 5th among oil producing states. And then by 1896 oil production peaked at 24 million barrels and Ohio  became the top oil producing state, only eclipsed by Oklahoma in 1902. 

                This boom brought in speculators, drillers and the perpetually hopeful to the geological area from Toledo, through Lima and into eastern Indiana along what geologists call the Bowling Green fault which fractured the Trenton limestone formation. Fun fact: The Bowling Green Fault is he only fault line around the Great Lakes. And unlike some other fault lines, nobody seems worried enough about it to write any disaster movies where it triggers a world ending earthquake or anything.

                Another fun fact: Lyman and I have the oil boom in common. I always laughed when somebody in my family mentioned that we were involved in the oil industry in Ohio because I thought it was a joke that they were all super committed to. Turns out, it was a real thing. So, this is awkward, anybody got a Ouija board I can borrow so I can apologize to my grandma?

                The authors of “Birmingham: Its past, present and future” write that Lyman was there “in the early days” of the oil boom and did quite well. Going by the fact that he is on a map showing property owners in Birmingham in 1872, he was probably in Ohio anywhere between 1865-the end of the Civil War- and the early 1870s. Or, he was only in Ohio a few short years because his son, John Bert Peabody (who went by Bert or J. Bert as an adult) was born in Michigan in 1867. So Lyman wasn’t there for the peak of oil production, but was possibly there in time to get in very early on and make some good money that way. 

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                But by 1872 Lyman was on the map (literally) in Birmingham and ran a successful dry goods store, which he ran for 35 years in the village. What did a dry goods store sell? Put a pin in that, I’m getting there.

                And what did Birmingham look like in 1872? The village had a population of about 700 people, John Allen Bigelow (he of train-stealing fame, go listen to his episode if you haven’t already) was postmaster and there were approximately 30 businesses in a busy village surrounded by productive farms (this is foreshadowing for the next episode). Birmingham’s Hill School had opened a few years prior and employed 5 teachers. In the center of the village, right in the intersection of Maple and what is today Old Woodward, stood an obelisk honoring soldiers from Birmingham and the surrounding area who had died during the Civil War. Lyman wasn’t the only dry goods game in town either- in the 1872 Gazetteer and Business directory of Michigan there are 5 other grocery and dry goods merchants listed in Birmingham. 

                But what exactly is a dry goods store anyway? The “dry” in the name refers to things that were sold in dry, instead of liquid, measures. A dry goods store carried ingredients like flour and sugar as well as consumer goods like cloth, toiletries, utensils and other goods tailored to the store’s customers. Basically, anything that didn’t spoil as it sat on the shelf. And it wasn’t unusual for a village or town to have multiple of these stores, as one store couldn’t possibly carry everything a population needed, letting different merchants specialize and carve out their own niches. Maybe the guy down the street has the dry bean market covered, so you specialize in high quality fabrics and the guy that owns the shop by the river sells fishing poles. 

                In addition to buying staples like flour and shotgun shells, at some dry goods stores you could do your banking (or have the merchant keep your money in their safe), pick up letters or a recent city newspaper, and exchange gossip. A wise dry goods merchant (especially in a competitive town like Birmingham) knew when and to whom to give credit, what he or she should stock up on, what the newest fad was that was coming down the pike, and the power of relationships and word-of-mouth. Plus, Lyman’s previous business successes left him a good position to have the money to buy high quality goods in bulk, saving him money in the long run, provided he picked the right high quality goods to stock up on. 

                As you may remember from our Levinson’s episode, the 1870s were a time before department stores in Birmingham, and many of these dry goods stores were, to our modern eyes, quite small. In an undated photograph in our collection, which I will put up on our website, we have a small group of people gathered in front of a storefront maybe a few meters long, the building is brick and is maybe one or two stories high and the front of the building has a covered wooden porch under a sign that reads “LB Peabody and Son General Store.” We’ll get to the son of the “& son” bit later.

                I don’t know if tea was what Lyman Peabody was known for before, but it was what he was known for in 1884. Tea has always been a popular drink in America. Heck, we started a revolution (in part) because we didn’t want to pay a tax on it. It was a staple in dry goods and general stores of the time, no matter where you were. The Henry Ford, that big museum down the road in Dearborn, has an intact general store from Waterford in its museum that lists the price of certain goods sold in that store in the 1880s. Tea was, depending on the color and quality, sold from $.45-.$75 per lb. It’s hard to make inflation calculations pre-1920s but for comparison in 1881, the average price in Michigan for a lb of coffee was $.20 and the average rate of pay for a male teacher that same year was a little under $37/month (with the average monthly pay for a female teacher almost $26). So, tea was a fairly affordable staple and maybe, for some making less money, a nice luxury to have occasionally.

                The bulk of the tea coming into the United States in the 1700s and early 1800s came from China. American merchants had been trading with China since the end of the Revolutionary War and most folks in Lyman’s day were familiar with Chinese goods that were imported like tea, ceramics (and the knock-offs produced in the United States by the middle of the 1800s) and fabrics like silks. 

                But there was one Asian country that had, for generations been closed off to the United States and the rest of the Western world that sparked curiosity among the citizens of Birmingham, Japan. In the 1630s, tiring of the constant flow of missionaries and bad trade deals, Japan closed itself off to foreigners. And everybody respected that decision. 

                Lol, the United States letting any other country just do it’s own thing? Unlikely. 

                In 1853, President Millard Fillmore, a president best known for looking like Alec Baldwin, sent Commodore Matthew Perry and some warships to force Japan to be our friend. This opened up several ports in the country for trade with the US and for refueling for whaling and military ships. For the first time in generations, this opened up Japanese trade for those in the United States. Americans became enamored with Japanese culture and goods.  One of those goods was Japanese Green Tea.

                In 1860, ten percent of total US tea imports came from Japan. That number jumps to 25 percent in 1870 and again to 47 percent in 1880. 

                And here’s where we get to the crux of the episode and also the point where I mentally spiraled for a few days. Have you ever lost something? Taken a can of beans out of a grocery bag, placed it on the counter, walked away to yell at the cat for eating plastic, walked back and then not been able to find the can? And then you feel like you are slowly going insane in an episode of The Twilight Zone because you are looking everywhere and retracing your steps and you still can’t find it? And then a few days later you discover that your roommate, while trying to be helpful, placed it in the cupboard next to the breakfast cereal?

                I think every person can relate and just about all the staff here. In 2019, I wrote a short article about how LB Peabody and Son’s General Store imported some Japanese tea that set Birmingham aflutter. Since it was a very short article, I didn’t mention my source. So when I was putting together this episode, being a responsible historian and all, I set about finding that source. And, of course, my notes from 2019 are deeply buried or recycled. But I knew the year this tea craze happened, so I thought that probably there was an article that year in the Birmingham Eccentric newspaper. The good news: the Eccentric is digitized. The bad news: It’s not searchable. Did I read every single issue from 1888? Yes. Then I read every single issue from 1901, when Lyman retired (spoilers, we’ll get to that in a minute) thinking that maybe the craze from 1888 would be mentioned. And then I read the issues around his death in 1911. I didn’t find it.

                Then, I decided to retrace my steps, as best I could from 2019. Six years of work and research. Everything else I wrote had documented sources right there in the appropriate folders, so I looked harder, thinking that maybe I stumbled upon the Peabody info while I was researching for our exhibit in 2019 or adding to our Facebook calendar of events and that that’s where I would find it.  No dice.

                So I went back to the metaphorical grocery bag, the digital folder of general information on the two main branches of the Peabody family and lo and behold on day three of my mental spiral I found the tea story sources among information not relating to Lyman and his dry goods store but regarding Jim Peabody and Peabody’s restaurant. Now, it is in it’s correct spot and correctly labeled, so I won’t have to go on a wild goose chase again. But, it illustrates really well about what I said at the top of the episode: the Peabodies can get confusing, even to folks who work here.

                I’ll also throw up the articles on our website too, on the podcast episode’s page, so now all of us will know where they are and won’t forget about them.

                So back to the actual tea incident itself. Japanese tea itself wasn’t too uncommon in the area, there were several ads from the first half of 1888 in the Eccentric from Whitehead and Mitchell’s store advertising Japanese Green tea. But Whitehead and Mitchell got their tea from wholesalers in Detroit, not directly from Japan. 

                Instead, Lyman got his directly from the source which meant he didn’t have only the tea itself but he had the original packaging and invoice as well, which were in Japanese characters. In our connected world it’s hard to think of an equivalent situation, where a whole country and culture has been separated from the rest of the world for 300 years- where no living generation in the west remembered a time when goods and knowledge flowed back and forth. And then suddenly being able to see, feel and experience the goods, culture and knowledge from that country in your own two hands. It must have felt like a seismic shift. The closest modern day equivalent in the United States might be North Korea’s closed society, but that’s only been a few decades and we know the language and it’s culture and political landscape. But Japan in 1880 was like a completely unknown world, and Lyman Peabody had a door to it.

                And the residents of Birmingham rushed to the store to see the packaging and invoice. It was a window to another place and other people, and Americans were curious…and maybe a bit obsessed. This was around the same time that many American cookbooks starting incorporating Chinese recipes  and cooking techniques and when white Americans began seeking out ethnic restaurants for new tastes and experiences. Food often gets adopted into the dominant culture before the people who created that food do. 

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                So, where does one go after your store creates a cross-cultural sensation? For Lyman, it was time to start thinking about his family and setting up his children for success. In 1888, the same year he rocked the town with tea, Lyman announced that he was taking his 21-year-old son son, J. Bert, into business with him. In 1893, J Bert married Alta Ford, the only daughter at the time of Frank Ford and his first wife, Elizabeth Stanley. J Bert and Alta moved into the recently built Ford Mansion (which became the Ford Peabody Mansion), which still stands today at the corner of Brown and Old Woodward. At the time, it was the stately home in Birmingham and we’ll talk about it more in another episode. 

                Lyman and Sarah Peabody also had three daughters. Harriet, born in 1866 married into the McBride and later Perry families. Blanche was born in 1869 and married into the Hanna family and Florence was born in 1875 and married into the Evans family. 

                And, like his fellow retail competitors, Whitehead and Mitchell, Lyman also held several civic posts in the village as well as running his commercial enterprise, he served as both village and school board president for many years. 

                After 35 years of business in Birmingham, Lyman retired in 1901 and sold his business and building to his son in law John Hanna for $3,000. When he died in July 1911, businesses in the city closed for a day out of respect. 

                 Lyman didn’t seem to advertise too much in the Eccentric, possibly cognizant that it was owned by his competitors. Quite possibly his longstanding relationship with his customer base and word of mouth was all the advertising he needed. From the clues we have, like his former business interests and being able to directly import a luxury good straight from its source, it seems like Lyman’s Birmingham niche could have been upscale or more luxury goods than those sold by his contemporaries like Whitehead, Mitchell and Bigelow. From the clues we have-and I do not have any direct sources from Lyman himself, his family or reporting at the time- Lyman appears to have had a real knack for identifying business opportunities early on, jumping on them and then getting out before the wave- be it a nation at war, an oil boom or a tea craze-crashed.  And it evidently worked, Lyman sold his business and building for a really good amount of profit when he retired and he held the respect of the community. And sometimes, even with all that, your grand-nephew will find a way to outshine you. At the time of his death, Lyman and his kids, particularly J Bert, were the best known Peabodies in town but that was going to change. Next time we’ll pick up the thread of James Peabody, Lyman’s brother, and see where the winds of commerce in 1870s Birmingham took him and the other Peabodies. We’ll finally touch on Peabody’s restaurant and sort out the two Peabody families once and for all… at least until the next time somebody comments about how the Peabodies could walk from their house (the Ford Peabody Mansion) to their restaurant and I have to be the guy that’s like, “well, actually….”

                I’m Caitlin Donnelly and thank you for joining us for this episode of Birmingham Uncovered. To see photos and other documents related to Lyman Peabody, his family, and his business, check out our website, the link is in the shownotes. For questions, comments and episode suggestions, feel free to reach us at museum@bhamgov.org. Special thanks to the Birmingham Area Cable Board for PEG grant funding that made this podcast possible. Also thanks to past and present staff of the Birmingham Museum, and our amazing volunteers.