I had to pull over this afternoon to take a picture of this billboard. According to the website, this is one of the few incandescently lighted signs remaining in the United States. I guess it is only lit at night but you can go to their site to see what it looks like in its full glory.
http://www.cfsauer.com/company/index.asp
In 1884, at age seventeen, Conrad Frederick Sauer began work for a retail and wholesale drug business in Richmond, Virginia. As a drug clerk, he dealt directly with customers who usually brought in their own bottles to be refilled with drugstore products. He soon noticed that flavoring extracts formed a large percentage of this business, because the housewives making the purchases were more assured of purity and strength from the drugstore products.
Mr. Sauer, a pharmacist by profession but a businessman by preference, had an idea. Why not provide these housewives with pure flavoring extracts, prepackaged, and make them available in grocery stores as well as drugstores?
On October 13,1887, his twenty-first birthday, C. F. Sauer founded the company that still bears his name at 17th and Broad Streets in Richmond. It was the first company in the country to provide pure flavoring extracts in five and ten-gram cartoned bottles, to be sold for fifteen and twenty-five cents, respectively. The company grew rapidly, as Mr. Sauer made products that had once cost a king’s ransom available to homemakers for a few pennies.
Contributing to the growth of the company was Mr. Sauer’s wife, Olga. She assisted in the plant, often coming in at night to help make the extracts and tasting them while they were stirred and mixed to her satisfaction. But perhaps her greatest gift to the company was her preparation of a "little exhibit" for the 1889 Virginia State Fair. This exhibit won first place in its class, and became the basis for international exhibits that would soon win world recognition for Sauer’s quality.
The business grew rapidly, necessitating several relocations. Twenty-four years after its founding, The C. F. Sauer Company moved to 2000 West Broad Street where its headquarters remain to this day. Remarkably the company has been under continuous family ownership for 120 years.
