Nappanee Loves a Parade!

Welcome to Bill’s History Corner, where we discuss all things about Coppes.

Today we are looking at pictures of parade floats. The town of Nappanee loved a good parade and still does to this day. The Coppes company, like many other businesses in Nappanee, participated by building a float for the parade. In the Coppes Commons collection we have photos of a George Lamb Company horse-drawn float,

a Mutschler Bros. truck decked out for a parade,

along with the “Vitreous on parade” float.

We also have two pictures of Coppes, Zook & Mutschler log wagons during one of the “Onion Days” celebrations in Nappanee.

Also, a picture of at least twelve horse & log wagons lined up for a picture. Was this picture during the “Onion Days” parade?

The Howenstein – Burback picture is of their parade float.

This Nappanee hardware store which was formed in 1899, was located in the building which later became Martin’s hardware.

The float from the McNeil & Higgins Company, Chicago (below), which is promoting the “None Such” brand of food products is a mystery, did they bring their float to Nappanee to participate in a parade or are we mistaken as to the location of this picture?

We have four photos of Coppes floats: two of the 1949 float pulled by a truck and one photo each of the 1921 and 1925 floats with several Coppes Napanee Cabinets on board.

If anyone has other pictures of Coppes floats or anything of interest we want to hear from you. We would like to make copies of your pictures and add them to our Coppes Commons collection.

If one picture is worth a 1000 words, then we talked a lot today. Thanks for visiting this site, come back next week for the next Bill’s History Corner installment.