ABSTRACT
International Parallels: In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries both country general stores and those in small towns and cities in the United States and Canada were dependent on the regular visits of traveling salesmen, also called commercial travelers or drummers, for the annual, semiannual, or more frequent replenishment of their different stocks of goods. There were traveling salesmen in every product from books, drugs, and foodstuffs, to dry goods, including shoes and clothing, to saddlery, harness, and farm machinery. Such traveling salesmen, as Clark and Carson have shown, were of particular importance before the advent of the automobile and the resulting growth of a network of good roads made it possible and convenient for storekeepers to make their own commercial buying trips to the great wholesale stores in cities like Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Cincinnati, Louisville, Pittsburgh, and Chicago. But as Gould has shown in Yankee Drummer, many such salesmen continued to function even after the automobile came in.
