page_title: Phoebe Snow (character)
section_title: The advertising campaign
hierarchical_section_title: Phoebe Snow (character) / The advertising campaign
caption_attribution_description: English: Ad for Lackawanna rail travel to Buffalo and elsewhere. From the New York Evening World. Cropped and converted to greyscale by the uploader using GIMP. Some Artefacts along the right of the image.
context_page_description: Phoebe Snow was a fictional character created by Earnest Elmo Calkins to promote the Delaware, Lackawanna and Western Railroad. The advertising campaign was one of the first to present a fictional character based on a live model amid impressionistic techniques.
context_section_description: Rail travel around 1900 was tough on the clothing of passengers. After a long trip on a coal-powered train, travellers frequently would disembark covered with black soot, unless the locomotives were powered by anthracite, a clean-burning form of coal. The Lackawanna owned vast anthracite mines in Pennsylvania, and could legitimately claim that the clothes of their passengers would remain clean after a long trip.
  To promote this, the Calkins advertising department created, "Phoebe Snow", a young New York socialite, and a frequent passenger of the Lackawanna. The advertising campaign presented Miss Snow as often traveling to Buffalo, New York and always wearing a white dress.  Calkins said he based the campaign on an earlier series of Lackawanna car cards (advertisements displayed inside coaches) - All in Lawn - created by DL&W advertising manager, Wendell P. Colton. They had been built on a rather limiting nursery rhyme, The House That Jack Built, and featured a nameless heroine dressed in white.  For his new campaign, Calkins adopted a form of verse inspired by an onomatopoetic rhyme, Riding on the Rail, that he felt offered endless possibilities. 
  The first advertisement featured the image of Phoebe and a short poem:
  Says Phoebe Snow
  about to go
  upon a trip to Buffalo
  "My gown stays white
  from morn till night
  Upon the Road of Anthracite"
  Phoebe soon became one of the most recognized advertising mascots in the United States, and she began to enjoy all the benefits offered by DL&W: gourmet food, courteous attendants, an observation deck, even onboard electric lights:
  Now Phoebe may
  by night or day
  enjoy her book upon the way
  Electric light
  dispels the night
  Upon the Road of Anthracite
  In 1903, filmmaker Edwin Porter parodied the advertising campaign with his short film A Romance of the Rails.
  "Phoebe Snow" was the only name Calkins ever used in the advertisements, and he laughed at later claims by Lackawanna officials that the name was selected only after lengthy scientific experimentation. The original artwork was painted by Henry Stacy Benton, who worked from a series of images of a model, Marion Murray Gorsch. Later, she was photographed in a variety of railroad activities while dressed in a white gown. Standing in for the cool, violet-corsaged Phoebe character of the paintings, Gorsch was one of the first models to be used in advertising.
  During World War I, anthracite was needed for the war effort and its use on railroads was prohibited, thus ending the career of Phoebe Snow. As she passed into legend, the Calkins heroine said farewell with the following jingle:
  Miss Phoebe's trip
  without a slip
  is almost o'er
  Her trunk and grip
  are right and tight
  without a slight
  "Good bye, old Road of Anthracite!"
caption: Ad for travel along the Lackawanna line in 1922. A portrait of Phoebe is depicted at the lower right.
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