{"id":3543,"date":"2013-07-21T18:42:26","date_gmt":"2013-07-22T01:42:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blackenedroots.com\/blog\/?p=3543"},"modified":"2025-05-07T08:35:17","modified_gmt":"2025-05-07T15:35:17","slug":"prettyman-barbershop","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blackenedroots.com\/blog\/prettyman-barbershop\/","title":{"rendered":"The Prettyman barbershop, part 1"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"2013-07-21<\/a>My great-grandfather, Charles Austin Prettyman, and his three brothers ran a barbershop in Wadena, Minnesota in the 1910s through at least the early 1920s. All four Prettyman boys were involved with the barbershop\u2014Roy, Irvin, Charles, and Clarence.\u00a0In fact, when my grandfather, William Prettyman, was born in 1919, his father’s profession was listed on the birth certificate as “barber.”<\/p>\n

I’ve found two photos of the barbershop, but because I don’t know who is who in these photos, I’m hoping my Prettyman relations out there can help me sort that out.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The barber on the viewer’s right is Roy Prettyman (thank you, Gerald), but I don’t know who the other three men are. Please let me know if you know.<\/p>\n

\"2013-07-21<\/a><\/p>\n

The second photo is, unfortunately, the one photo I scanned incorrectly when I was at the Wadena Area Historical Society. I forgot to set the crop indicators properly, so this is only a portion of the photo. I’ll have to rescan this one when I’m in Wadena again. Please let me know if you know who the barber is:<\/p>\n

\"2012-11-12-WCHS-001\"<\/a><\/p>\n

When searching for additional information about the Prettyman barbershop, I was surprised to find an article entitled A brief history of barbers in Wadena<\/em><\/a> that mentions the Prettyman barbershop. All of the Prettyman brothers except for Charles are mentioned.<\/p>\n

I also stumbled upon\u00a0an obituary for Sidney Smith<\/a>, who apparently worked in the Prettyman barbershop under Charles for three years, beginning in 1914 (it’s a sad story\u2014Sidney developed a brain tumor and died in 1924\u00a0of surgical complications stemming from the removal of the tumor).<\/p>\n

If you can identify anyone in these photos, if you have other photos of the barbershop, or if you can tell me anything about the Prettyman barbershop, please let me know!<\/p>\n

To close, here’s a shot of downtown Wadena in 1920, to give you an idea of what the town looked like when towards the end of the Prettyman barbershop’s days. If the scan were higher resolution, it might even be possible to see their barbershop (assuming it was on Jefferson Street). There’s a sign about halfway down the right side of the street that almost looks like it says “Barbers,” but I think it says “Hardware.” Alas.<\/p>\n

\"Wadena<\/a><\/p>\n

Read more in part 2<\/a>…<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My great-grandfather, Charles Austin Prettyman, and his three brothers ran a barbershop in Wadena, Minnesota in the 1910s through at least the early 1920s. All four Prettyman boys were involved with the barbershop\u2014Roy, Irvin, Charles, and Clarence.\u00a0In fact, when my … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","_wp_rev_ctl_limit":""},"categories":[40,39,217,27,220,218,219],"tags":[207,214],"class_list":["post-3543","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-1910s","category-1920s","category-barber","category-charles-austin-prettyman","category-clarence-prettyman","category-g-i-prettyman","category-roy-prettyman","tag-minnesota","tag-wadena"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blackenedroots.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3543","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blackenedroots.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blackenedroots.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blackenedroots.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blackenedroots.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3543"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blackenedroots.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3543\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9316,"href":"https:\/\/blackenedroots.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3543\/revisions\/9316"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blackenedroots.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3543"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blackenedroots.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3543"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blackenedroots.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3543"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}