Solved - Two Years Later!!
Well, it took just short of two years, but I solved my own mystery! No tale of masterful research or online sleuthing - by sheer coincidence, I managed to find another pendant while detecting a former one room school site earlier this week (
Forum thread: Mystery Find Solved Two Years Later!). It was heavily dirt encrusted out of the ground, but once it dried a little, some details started to show through, and I immediately remembered and recognized the features from this old find!
The recent pendant find didn’t clean up the best, but it has far more detail than my previous find, and it didn’t take long to bring out enough features and lettering to ID it online! Turns out that it’s a novelty/advertising medallion that Royal Brand created for a store or clothier to give to the young lads when his parents purchased one of their suits. Royal Brand specialized in low to mid range priced clothes for young to teenaged boys in the early 1900s.
The first newspaper ad below shows a similar logo, and dates from 1906. The second ad (from 1907) specifically mentions getting a “gold medal” with purchase of a suit. The last one is an ad I found from a 1908 newspaper which I just thought was hysterical! “For the strenuous boy, the Royal suit is just the garment you want to put on that red-blooded, sturdy-legged lad of yours” - you’ve gotta love those old advertisements! Last is an image of a more pristine example that I found online.
Anyways, the piece isn’t much, but I like it as a pretty cool bit of history - made all the better by the way it helped solve the ID of my “mystery” object! And a great example to never give up on IDing a find - you never know when you might stumble onto the information you need!
