Carol Mullen
Catalog Number: 2018.007.01
If time travel were an option, you might want to go back a hundred years to order garden seeds from Salzer Seed Company in La Crosse.
This 1919 order form with fancy letterhead featured Salzer’s Jubilee Nasturtium Mix for only 15 cents a package.
A huge firm by 1919, Salzer Seed Company began with a man who loved to garden.
John Salzer, pastor of the German-speaking Methodist Church in La Crosse, created a market garden in 1866 on the southeast corner of Seventh and Adams streets to help support his family of 10 children. By 1868, his garden had expanded, and he founded the John A. Salzer Seed Company.
Initially, Salzer Seed sold flowers, shrubs and produce locally. The company mailed out its first single-page seed catalog in 1876. From there, business took off.
A profile of the firm in “La Crosse, Her Trade, Commerce, and Industries: 1883-1884” stated, “The collection of plants owned by Mr. Salzer is estimated at $20,000 value and the transactions of the house, which reach all over the United States, will amount to over $40,000 per annum. This is the largest house of the kind in the Northwest, outside of Chicago, and Mr. Salzer also owns seed farms where he grows seeds for his large seed trade in St. Vincent, Minnesota, and Bath and Groton, Dakota, also has control of a small seed farm for growing celery, lettuce, and beet seeds near Sacramento, California. Handsome and complete catalogues of plants and seeds have been prepared by Mr. Salzer, which can be obtained upon application, German or English edition as desired.”
By the time Salzer Seed incorporated in 1886, its business was international. Salzer employed 190 people in La Crosse by the 1890s, mostly women filling orders in peak spring season. Buildings and greenhouses covered the entire block at Seventh and Adams.
Salzer was able to claim on its 1919 logo, “Salzer’s Seeds Are Sown the World Over.” Now headed by John Salzer’s son Henry following his father’s death, the firm was sending out 170-page catalogs to multiple countries. Seed potatoes were mailed to Ireland, tulip bulbs to Holland and seed for grass hula skirts to Hawaii.
By the late 1930s, Salzer Seed — under Henry Salzer’s son Kenneth — reached $1 million in annual sales, employing 200 people in La Crosse. But the company slipped after World War II. In 1945, it was sold to Lester Duryea, a Chicago candy businessman.
Salzer Seed continued to operate into the 1950s. In 1956 Duryea sold the mail-order seed business to Farmer’s Seed and Nursery of Faribault, Minnesota.
Greenhouses remained in La Crosse for a few years. They, too, were sold in 1958, ending 90 years of garden business at Seventh and Adams streets.
This article was originally published in the La Crosse Tribune on June 13, 2020.
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