Sorting through almost a century of history at Federal Cartridge

While it has been a great relief to work part-time at the Anoka County Historical Society’s museum again since the beginning of June, that is not the only place I’ve been working. With a hundred-year anniversary coming up quickly in 2022, Federal Premium Ammunition has partnered with the historical society to get their business archives organized, and I’ve been spending a couple days a week working to process those materials.

There is a lot to do — the collection contains everything from financial records to metal printing plates — but I indulged my own curiosity by starting with the sizable collection of packaging materials that were set aside for preservation. While not including every product package that Federal Cartridge has created, it is still a sizable selection.

My first step was to sort the packaging samples and do some weeding. Consulting with Federal, we decided to keep two copies of each unique piece (when possible); this meant that when I found a whole box full of the exact same pieces, I didn’t need to keep all of them. Some boxes had been sorted out in the past, though, and I just had to match up identical pieces to make sure they were organized.

I learned a lot about Federal’s product history just doing that much; their product inventory has covered both shotgun shells and various kinds of rifle and pistol ammunition over the years, with many different product lines for different uses, including hunting and competition target shooting. Another interesting fact I didn’t know before starting this job was that Federal served as an ammunition vendor for other companies, creating ammunition and packaging so that places like Sears, Montgomery Ward, and Gambles Stores could sell ammunition under their own brands. While the majority of the packaging in the collection represents Federal’s own brand, there is a good selection of pieces created for these client companies as well.

The next step was more organizing. With all the unneeded duplicates out of the way, I put the outside brands aside and pulled the packaging for each of Federal’s product lines together. Then I worked through the items, getting similar pieces together in archival folders with a label to indicate the contents. Once I got through Federal’s pieces, I did the same with the outside brands they created as a vendor.

Dating all of these pieces was either very easy or quite a challenge. Many of the packaging pieces were samples sent to someone in the company for review, and had specific dates written on the backs — those were the easy ones. But some had no definite dates on them at all, which meant I either couldn’t date them at all, or could only make an estimate based on the look of the packaging or similar-looking pieces that did have dates. With packaging samples from the 1930s up through the early 2000s, I will probably be relying on assistance from Federal to review and pin down dates for some of the pieces more accurately. The institutional memory and knowledge in place in a long-running business can be extensive and helpful for a project like this, even when the people who created some of the earliest packaging are no longer around.

Another interesting aspect of working with packaging was seeing just how much the designs have changed over decades. While this is helpful for dating in some cases (packaging from the 1930s is very distinct from that of the 1990s), over shorter time spans it wasn’t always clear: packaging in the 1930s and 1950s didn’t necessarily look very different, nor packaging from the 1970s versus the 1980s. I’m grateful that so many of the pieces did have specific dates written on them, or this part of the project would have been more difficult.

With all of the flat packaging (boxes that were never folded out into their three-dimensional forms) taken care of, I still have a smaller amount of assembled boxes to organize, number, and store in archival boxes. Eventually, I’ll be getting to a related part of the Federal collection: the metal printing plates that were used to actually print the packaging for many years. Those will come with their own challenges, since many are large, or heavy, or both … but that is for another time!

Audra Hilse is the collections manager for the Anoka County Historical Society.