NETCA 2024 Commemorative Car

LIONEL 6464-975   S. S. PIERCE BOX CAR

Price: $89 plus $12 shipping per car

Boston’s long-treasured Importer/Grocer is commemorated with this genuine Lionel box car, custom-designed for NETCA.  These fine delicacies are flying off the shelf! Reserve yours today for delivery this summer!

You could say Samual Pierce "cornered the market"

Opening in a four-story granite building on the corner of Court and Tremont in 1841, Pierce is quoted as saying “If you can’t have your grocery on a corner, don’t have one at all.” And so it was again in 1887 when the growing enterprise moved to Copley Square in the newly filled-in Back Bay. The successful formula was followed again in 1898 when the Pierce family opened another location in the distant suburbs, Coolidge Corner, Brookline.

19th century Boston, a time of growth and a demand for excellence

During the nineteenth century, Boston evolved from a bustling port town to a booming industrial city. Through landfill and annexations, the city's footprint grew dramatically, from 1.5 to more than 40 square miles, while its population increased more than eightfold from 1820-1880. With growth, came an economic boom, and a class that demanded the finest in goods and services.

Since the days of the clipper ships, Boston's S. S. Pierce has reserved its famous label for the best in foods and delicacies to be found throughout the world. Whether brown bread or Bombay duck, cranberries or crepes amandine, extracts or escargots, maple syrup or marrons, welsh rarebit or wild rice, the name S. S. Pierce on the label is your guarantee of excellence and value. Buyers recognized the distinctive quality of the products bearing the S. S. Pierce label and agreeing that it is of discriminating taste.

In addition to a wide variety of goods for sale, the company provided notable customer service.

S. S. Pierce maintained a well-drilled corps of salesmen who would phone housewives at appointed hours. They not only suggested menus but answered such arcane questions as how to cook an ostrich egg (boil it) or how to extract the flavor from a 6-in. vanilla bean (bury a 1-in. cutting from the bean for a month in a pound of sugar). Once when a hostess in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., complained that a case of turtle soup had not arrived, a Pierce salesman took an overnight train to deliver it in person — just in time for her party.

S.S. Pierce labeled tobacco products as a tribute to a famous Chicago-San Francisco train, filled with anecdotes about the great and famous passengers in their "Overland" cigars.

The Overland Limited was one of the earliest flagship trains of the Overland Route between Chicago and San Francisco Bay. Jointly operated by the Chicago & North Western, UP, and Southern Pacific, a heavyweight-era Overland is shown in a colorized postcard from the 1 920s heading over the Great Salt Lake on SP's Lucin Cutoff.

The end.
Though the name S. S. Pierce is still a licensed brand (primarily liquor products) the company came to an end more than fifty years ago.  In 1972 the S.S. Pierce Company., which had involved four generations of the Pierce family, was sold to Seneca Foods Corp., of New York.