A Galveston native, Fredrick Allen (1849–1901) enlisted in the Confederate army at age twelve. In the 1868–69 Galveston directory, he is recorded as an engraver with the firm Prince & Barnum. The following year, Allen entered business under his own name, F. Allen & Co., advertising in the Texas Almanac as a dealer in diamonds and fine watches. His independent venture did not last; in 1871, Allen moved to Memphis, Tennessee, probably to work for one of his former employers at F. D. Barnum & Co. He remained there until at least 1874 and is recorded as either a salesman or an engraver in the city directories for those years. About 1876 he returned to Galveston and took a position managing the jewelry store of T. E. Thompson, remaining there for the next twenty years. Upon Thompson’s death in 1895, Allen and two partners purchased Thompson’s interest and established Fred Allen & Company. As a large retail outlet, the store offered an extensive inventory. In 1901 Allen died of heart failure, and the remaining partners purchased Fred Allen & Company, forming Nobbe & Roempke.

At the end of the eighteenth century the dessert fork and spoon (see B.69.256.6) became the latest accompaniment to the American dining table. The dessert fork, along with its accompanying knife, was one of the essential dining utensils Thomas Webster included in his Encyclopaedia of Domestic Economy (1845) among “the usual articles in silver required to furnish a table. . . .”

Book excerpt: David B. Warren, Michael K. Brown, Elizabeth Ann Coleman, and Emily Ballew Neff. American Decorative Arts and Paintings in the Bayou Bend Collection. Houston: Princeton Univ. Press, 1998.