“A sausage is an image of rest, peace and tranquility in stark contrast to the destruction and chaos of everyday life.” – Tom Robbins, Another Roadside Attraction
Trademark for Uncle Jerry’s Sausage Company
In a previous article on CreoleGen, we profiled the Reverend Pierre Caliste Landry (1841-1921), a former slave, merchant, politician, Methodist minister and educator, who was the first Black elected (rather than appointed) mayor in the United States. While most of his children followed him into meaningful yet sobering careers in education or the ministry, his third son picked up on his business acumen.
Joseph Caliste Landry (1870-1930), Donaldsonville native and partner in Uncle Jerry’s Sausage Company of Chicago. Photograph in Dunn-Landry Papers at the Amistad Research Center.
Joseph Caliste Landry was born in 1870 in Donaldsonville, once the largest river port between New Orleans and Baton Rouge. He was the third son and sixth of fourteen children born to the Honorable Pierre Caliste Landry and his two wives, Amanda Grigsby and later Florence Simpkins. The Landry family lived in Donaldsonville until 1895, when they migrated to Uptown New Orleans. Joseph worked as a brakeman and later as a porter for steam railroad. He married Maude (Patton) Haywood of Alabama and reared her son, DeWitt Clifford Haywood (1900-1980). The Landrys lived in New Orleans at 1829 Peniston Street, until 1924, when they settled in Chicago.
Advertisement for Uncle Jerry’s Sausage Company, The Chicago Defender, 9 February 1924.
The move to the Windy City brought a change in economic interests for Joseph C. Landry who became a member of the Uncle Jerry’s Sausage Company, which began in about 1923, producing pork sausages. The principal figure behind the company was Benzie Wesson (1891-1951), a Mississippi native reared in Arkansas, who named the company after his father, Jerry Wesson, an octogenarian who began making sausage at the age of eighteen. On 16 February 1925, the company registered its trademark with the federal government. Uncle Jerry’s Sausage Company, located at 3707 Westworth, was incorporated in the state of Illinois in 1927 with $20,000 in capital stock. The incorporators were Benzie Wesson, Green Johnson, Joseph C. Landry, Hosea Thompson, and Julian Wells. Uncle Jerry’s was a pioneer among Black-owned food manufacturers. By 1940, there were two other sausage producers, the Parker House Sausage Company and the Triangle Sausage Company, all three of which were located on South State Street [the 106-year-old Parker House Sausage Company is still in business in Chicago’s Bronzeville neighborhood]. Earlier, “Sausage King” Frank Matticx, Sr., who split from Uncle Jerry’s, had organized the Matticx & Son Creole Sausage Company, prior to his unfortunate arrest and imprisonment in 1934.
Success of the Uncle Jerry’s Sausage Company noted in the Chicago Defender, 14 February 1929.
Landry was an active member of the Louisiana Social and Beneficial Club of Illinois, just one of many “home clubs” which Southerners formed in their new homes during the Great Migration. Joseph Caliste Landry took sick in October 1929 with the effects of chronic nephritis. He was attended to in his last illness by his nephew, Dr. Alexander Bismarck Terrell. He died at his home, 6211 South Michigan Avenue, on 26 January 1930. He was survived by his wife, Maude (Petton) Landry, and his stepson, DeWitt Clifford Haywood (who later named one of his two sons, James Caliste Haywood, in his honor).
The Chicago Defender reported on the obsequies in New Orleans for Joseph Caliste Landry.
His body was shipped to New Orleans, where he was waked in the home of his sister and brother-in-law, Reverend and Mrs. Henderson H. Dunn at 2924 Louisiana Avenue. His funeral took place at the Central Congregational Church. Joseph Caliste Landry is interred in the Carrollton (Green Street) Cemetery with his father and namesake, the Honorable Pierre Caliste Landry, many of his siblings, and several generations of nieces and nephews.
Death certificate for sausage manufacturer Joseph C. Landry of 6211 South Michigan Avenue, Chicago.
Pierre C. Landry family coping in Carrollton (Green Street) Cemetery.
Jari C. Honora
Sources: The Chicago Defender, [advertisement for Uncle Jerry’s], 9 February 1924, sec. 2, p. 11; “$50.00 Reward,” 14 August 1926, p. 8; “Trade Week Movement is Set on Foot,” 9 August 1927, p. 2; 14 February 1929, p. 5, col. 8; “New Orleans News,” 15 February 1930, p. 16; “Rites Held for Julian T. Wells,” 21 January 1933, p. 24; “Matticx, Sausage Man, Insane, Kills Sweetheart,” 18 August 1934, p. 1; The Light and Heebies Jeebies (Chicago), “Louisiana Social,” 1 October 1927, p. 27. The National Provisioner (Chicago), 6 June 1925, p. 29. Christopher Robert Reed, The Rise of Chicago’s Black Metropolis, 1920-1929 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2011), 100.
Pierre “Calliste” Landry was my great-grand-father and a wonderful civil servant and religious leader of Donaldsonville, LA. Hallelujah!