ALTON - On July 24, 1923, Nell Johnston announced her new enterprise: the manufacture of potato chips. “Some people are skillful in painting, some of them in pie making, [or] housekeeping, but Mrs. Johnston has skill in making potato chips and she plans to make Alton famous for her potato chips, just as many another city is famous for its products.” Ads for Mrs. Johnston’s potato chips popped up in the Alton Telegraph about twice a week, and the chips were available in grocery stores all over Alton, including Schwegel’s Market. But almost exactly one year later, on July 16, 1924, Johnston notified Telegraph readers of the closure of her business: the industry “did not thrive enough to warrant its continuance.”
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Several other potato chip businesses sprang up in Alton around the same time period. Most potato chips were made in home kitchens, but the Alton Tater-Flake factory owned a machine produced by the Tater-Flake Company of Chicago that peeled and sliced the potatoes, then dropped the slices into oil kept at a constant 218 degrees Fahrenheit. A propeller kept the flakes rotating through the oil until they were done. It took about two minutes to complete the entire process for each batch, and 500 ounces of chips could be produced in an hour. But the Alton Tater-Flake factory didn’t seem to last long in Alton either. Potato chips at the time didn’t have a very long shelf life, and people just couldn’t eat them fast enough to make the process worth it.
The oldest reference to “potato chips” in the Alton Evening Telegraph is from January 1902, but “Saratoga Chips” made their debut in the Telegraph in 1880 at Silas Connor’s grocery store on West Third Street. Potato chips, originally known as Saratoga Chips, were likely invented (definitely popularized) in the 1850s in Saratoga Lake, N.Y. by George Speck (later known as George Crum), the son of an African American father and Native American mother, while he was working as the chef of the Moon Lake Lodge Resort. One dish on the menu was French-fried potatoes, which are prepared by cutting potatoes lengthwise and lightly frying them.
According to legend, one day a customer sent his French-fried potatoes back to the kitchen several times, complaining that they were too thick and soft. Finally, Crum got so annoyed that he shaved the potatoes as thin as possible, fried them until they were brown, and liberally sprinkled them with salt, expecting the customer to find them inedible. Instead, the customer loved them. Another version of the story is that Crum’s sister, Kate Speck Wicks, who also worked at Moon Lake Lodge Resort, accidentally dropped a thin slice of potato into hot fat and Crum fished it out, tasted it, and declared it a success. Several years later, Crum opened his own restaurant near Saratoga. A basket of homemade chips welcomed diners at every table.
Sources
Alton City Directory and Madison County Gazetteer. 1887. Alton, Ill: J.E. Fitzpatrick. https://archive.org/details/alton-city-directory-1886-87
Belman, Laurel. “Potato Chip Inventions.” Smithsonian National Museum of American History, 2014. https://invention.si.edu/potato-chip-inventions
“City and County News.” Alton Daily Telegraph (Alton, IL), November 2, 1880.
“George Crum and the Potato Chip.” Saratoga County History Center, 2024. https://brooksidemuseum.org/2013/10/george-crum-and-the-potato-chip/
“New Potato Chip Industry Here.” Alton Evening Telegraph (Alton, IL), July 24, 1923.
“Our Story.” Saratoga Chips, 2024. https://originalsaratogachips.com/our-story/
“Potato Chip Industry Discontinued.” Alton Evening Telegraph (Alton, IL), July 16, 1924.
“Tater-Flake Co. Unusual Affair in City.” Quad-City Times (Davenport, Iowa), Nov 23, 1924.
Vosbury, Margaret. Methods of Manufacturing Potato Chips. [Washington Govt. print. off, 1922] Pdf. https://www.loc.gov/item/agr22000571/.
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