24th Avenue at E. 20th Street
A nice escutcheon from this rarely seen maker.
Lucien Putnam (1829-1903) was born in Houlton, Maine, to one of that border town’s founding families. He is recorded in Reading, Massachusetts, in the 1850 census clerking for his uncle Franklin. He spent his young adulthood, from the mid-1850s to about 1870, in the forest of Minnesota Territory, where he married Elizabeth Wernes and rose to the Minneapolis middle class as a lumber dealer and radical church member. (Later in life he helped organize the San Francisco Swedenborgian Church.) The 1880 census found him in Albany, Oregon, with his wife and five children, where he was involved in an “agriculture factory” (probably a lumber mill).
Putnam was a registered Oakland voter in 1886 (“mechanic”) and appeared in the 1889 city directory as an “artificial stone mfr” at 1274 7th Street. The directory for 1903, the year of his death, had him at 817 17th Street as a contractor.
Putnam’s remaining stamps are few and scattered. It’s a safe assumption that even without dates, they probably date from the late 1800s.
Oakland Underfoot 