Fred Harvey Company — Southwest Jewelry Trading Company & Marks

Name-card placeholder — historic shop-mark imagery to follow. © Turquoise Skies Inc.

Trading company · Santa Fe Railway corridor, Southwest · jewelry program from 1899 · Southwest Jewelry Guide

Overview

The Fred Harvey Company is the institution most associated with the commercialization of Southwest Indian jewelry. Adair dates the turn precisely: "The commercialization of the craft began in 1899 when the Fred Harvey Company first started to order silver made up expressly for white consumption." That year, Herman Schweizer, longtime head of the company's curio department, asked a turquoise-mine owner in Nevada to cut stones into flat, square and oblong shapes for Indian use, then supplied silver and cut turquoise to the traders, who "farmed out" the materials to smiths paid by the ounce — a system Adair says "proved to be a very satisfactory method of obtaining jewelry for the tourist trade."

Rosnek & Stacey describe the result: Navajo jewelry obtained for the Harvey Company was sold aboard the Santa Fe trains and at the Harvey Houses along the line, including the big hotels in Albuquerque and at the Grand Canyon. Bedinger likewise marks 1899 as the year Schweitzer "began to exploit the Navajo silverworkers to supply items for sale to tourists."

Per Hougart, in 1938 the company stated "the chief requisite for genuine Indian Silver Jewelry is that it be the product of a single artisan, from the melting of the silver to completion of the finished article." The company was purchased by AMFAC Corporation in 1968, and a new division was formed called the Fred Harvey Trading Company.

The marks

"Marks: Fred Harvey (script, may be on silver plate, copper or applied tag); UITA 4 and U. S. NAVAJO; Fred Harvey with Navajo or Zuni (circa late 1930s); Fred Harvey Trading Company (with Est. 1876 and figure of a man in the center of the stamp)" — Hougart, Bille. Native American and Southwestern Silver Hallmarks, 5th ed. (2022), p. ~358. [OCR-reconstructed ordering; mark texts verbatim]

Artists connected to the Fred Harvey Company

Most smiths reached the company anonymously through trader intermediaries, so few names are documented. Per Hougart, Paul Saufkie's early career included silversmith work for the Fred Harvey Company at the Grand Canyon; and Santa Fe's Southwest Arts & Crafts shop "became a significant wholesale supplier to the Fred Harvey Company in the 1930s-40s."

References

• Adair, John. The Navajo and Pueblo Silversmiths. University of Oklahoma Press, 1944.
• Rosnek, Carl, and Joseph Stacey. Skystone and Silver: The Collector's Book of Southwest Indian Jewelry. Prentice-Hall, 1976.
• Bedinger, Margery. Indian Silver: Navajo and Pueblo Jewelers. University of New Mexico Press, 1973.
• Hougart, Bille. Native American and Southwestern Silver Hallmarks, 5th ed. Schiffer Publishing, 2022. Shops section, p. ~358.