Dear Vance: I have an old felt patch for Bemis Bags Memphis. What did this company make, and where was it located? — G.K., Memphis
Dear G.K.: A careful look at the stitching tells me this company made … bags.
But I suppose you want more information than that [yes, he does, Vance – ed.] so I’ll keep typing until I tell you all I know about this company.
First of all, anyone who thinks of a “bag company” probably assumes they made sacks like Kroger uses for your groceries. And Bemis, at one time or another, probably made those. But nowadays, if you unwrap a package of Kraft cheese, squeeze Crest toothpaste from a tube, or swig a Pepsi from a plastic bottle, Bemis made those too. In fact the Bemis Company — they dropped “bag” from their name years ago — makes about every kind of food container and packaging you can think of, with more than 25,000 employees and 80 plants, mills, factories, and distribution centers in 12 countries around the globe.
The company was founded in St. Louis in 1858 by Judson Moss Bemis, a former shipping clerk who started making cloth bags for flour. What ensured his success was the ability to produce finely woven bags that resisted tearing or leaking. Bemis, now joined by his brother Stephen, also came up with a way to print a company’s name or logo directly onto the cloth bags. According to a company history, this innovation “saved millers the time-consuming, messy task of stenciling, and also appealed to the average consumer, long accustomed to buying flour in cumbersome wooden barrels.”
Bemis Brothers Bag Company opened a branch here in 1900, first located in a downtown alley between Main and Front. In 1912, the company moved to a five-story building at 134 East Carolina, where they remained until the 1950s, when the firm moved its operations to 1975 Latham.
In the meantime, the national headquarters of Bemis had also moved around a bit, with major plants in Boston and Seattle, before finally setting on Neenah, Wisconsin, where their worldwide operations are based today.
The Memphis operation was part of the Converted Paper and Paperboard Products Division, where they made paper bags for groceries. But as more and more merchants offered their customers plastic bags, the paper sack market almost disappeared, and Bemis closed its Memphis plant in 1997.
Now, that felt patch obviously wasn’t sewn onto any of these products, and it could have been part of a regular company uniform, but I wonder if it came from a baseball uniform.
In the early 1900s, Bemis fielded its own baseball team, competing against other companies in town. The best way to prove the patch came from a ball player’s uniform is to find a photograph of the team. Well, looking through a “finder’s guide” to the company archives stored in the Seattle Museum of History and Industry, I came across a reference to Folder #1994.15.1.28.1-5, holding materials for “Bemis baseball teams from Memphis, New Orleans, Minneapolis, Indianapolis, and Omaha.” And what really caught my eye was this notation on that particular folder: “Includes letters extolling the relative good looks of the teams, apparently in response to a photograph of the Seattle team.”
Well, I’ll decide for myself if the Memphis team was better-looking than those in other cities. Fuel up the limousine, Basil. We’re headed to Seattle!
