Stories behind the cards
The history, places and people behind old American postcards, one story at a time.
Most people look at the picture first. The address side, with its stamp, its postmark and a few lines of handwriting, often says more. Turn an old postcard over and you'll find a small record of a real moment: a person, a place, a stamp, a date, and sometimes the route the card took to get where it was going. For dating a card, researching a family or just understanding how ordinary Americans used the mail a century ago,…
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A single ear of corn fills a railroad car, a fisherman lands a bass bigger than his boat, and a farmer hitches a team to haul one onion. Welcome to the exaggeration postcard. Some old postcards ask you to believe them. Exaggeration postcards dare you not to laugh. They show farmers dwarfed by potatoes, hunters riding jackrabbits the size of horses, and wagons loaded with a single enormous peach. Collectors also call them tall tale cards, and some of the photographers who made them called them "freak" or…
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The American picture postcard grew up at the world's fairs, and for almost fifty years every big exposition left a pile of cards behind it. Few subjects tie into the history of the postcard as neatly as the world's fair. The great American expositions were built to be seen, photographed and remembered, and the postcard was the cheapest way to take a piece of one home or to tell someone back home that you had been. From the 1890s to…
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For about ten years, sending a picture postcard was the most ordinary thing in the world, and the numbers the Post Office recorded are still hard to believe. If you have ever opened an old family album and found page after page of postcards, you have seen the leftovers of a national habit. In the years around 1905 to 1915, Americans mailed picture postcards the way people now send text messages: to say they had arrived, to report the weather, to show off…
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Many of the only surviving pictures of small American towns were taken by photographers who arrived, set up a camera, and moved on. When I pick up a real photo postcard of a tiny town, a muddy main street, a one room school, a crossroads store with a dog asleep on the porch, I always wonder who stood behind the camera. Often there's no name on the card at all. Sometimes there's a studio stamp, a set of…
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For most of half a century a postcard cost a penny to mail, and that single cent shaped both what people wrote and how collectors date cards today. The phrase "penny postcard" survives in everyday speech long after the price disappeared. For most of the years between the 1870s and 1951, mailing a postcard inside the United States cost one cent. That small number shaped the whole culture of the postcard: how people used them, what they wrote, and even how the cards…
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Old postcards are one of the friendliest collecting hobbies there is. You can start with a shoebox, a magnifier and a little curiosity. One of the nice things about old postcards is that a great many of them are inexpensive. Billions were printed and mailed in the early twentieth century, and a large share of what survives is common. That means you can build a satisfying, interesting collection without spending much, and learn a great deal along the…
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A postcard is a tiny letter with an address, a date and a place on it. For a family historian, that can be a lot. Most genealogy runs on official records: censuses, birth and death certificates, marriage licenses, deeds and probate files. Those records tell you who someone was on paper. A postcard can tell you something different: where a person was on a particular day, who they wrote to, how they spelled their name, what they cared about enough…
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Linen postcards are the snapshots of a country learning to travel by car, printed in colors brighter than the places ever were. If the real photo postcard is the portrait of the small American town, the linen postcard is the portrait of the American road. From the early 1930s into the early 1950s, these textured, brightly colored cards showed the places travelers stopped along the way: tourist courts and motor lodges, filling stations, diners, roadside curiosities and…
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Flip over a postcard from 1910 and one from 1920 and you can read a decade of trade policy, war and postal history in the differences. If you sort a box of old American view cards by date, something happens around the middle of the 1910s. The cards before it tend to be rich, finely detailed and often marked "Printed in Germany." The cards after it are more often marked "Made in U.S.A.," framed by a plain white border, and printed…
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A reproduction can look right from across the room. Up close, with a magnifier and a little patience, most of them give themselves away. Old postcards have been reprinted for decades. Some reprints were made openly, as souvenirs or decorations, and are clearly labeled. Others were made the same way but have since lost their context, turning up in boxes and online listings next to genuine cards with nothing to say they are new. A smaller number were made…
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Long before the red-suited Santa settled into place, Christmas postcards showed him in blue, green, brown and white, often embossed and edged in gold. For a few years in the early twentieth century, the postcard was the standard way to send holiday greetings. It was cheap to buy, cheap to mail, and quick to write. Millions of Americans sent Christmas and New Year cards to relatives, friends and neighbors, and many of those cards were kept in albums, which…
Keep reading →Every old postcard is a small piece of evidence. The front shows a place on a particular day. The back carries a stamp, a postmark and, often, a few lines from someone who expected their words to be read once and then forgotten. This blog follows those clues wherever they lead: into the history of a town, the business of a publisher, the work of a traveling photographer, or the everyday life of a family a century ago.
Some posts look closely at a single card from my own boxes. Others step back to explain a whole era of postcard history, such as why Americans mailed hundreds of millions of cards a year before the First World War, or how the linen cards of the 1930s and 40s recorded the rise of the American highway. A few are practical: how to spot a reproduction, how to start a collection without spending much, or how to use old postcards for family history.
I want these posts to be useful and accurate. Dates, names and places are checked against reliable sources before they go in, and when something can't be confirmed, the post says so rather than guessing. When a post talks about one of my own cards, it sticks to what the card actually shows and says. If I don't know who sent a card or who received it, I say that plainly, because an honest "unknown" is better than an invented story.
A new post goes up every week. If there's a subject you'd like to see covered, a town, a publisher, a kind of card, or a question you've always had about old postcards, it may well turn up here.
If you're new to old postcards, three posts make a good introduction: the story of the postcard craze, the history of the penny postcard, and the guide to starting a collection on a budget. For the practical side of collecting, my collector's notes cover dating cards, reading postmarks, identifying real photo postcards and storing a collection safely.
Postcard history. How a small piece of card became one of the most popular ways Americans kept in touch. Start with why Americans mailed billions of postcards during the craze before the First World War, then read how the penny postcard rate shaped what people wrote, and how the First World War changed American postcards when German printing was cut off and white borders took over.
Photographers and publishers. The people who made the cards. Traveling real photo photographers went from town to town with cameras and sold their views in local shops, while big printers like Curt Teich filled the highways with linen postcards of the motor age.
Holidays. Some of the most beautiful cards ever printed were greetings. Early Christmas postcards looks at the Santas, embossing and publishers of the 1900s and 1910s, and my guide to vintage Halloween postcards covers the most sought-after holiday of all.
Collecting. Practical advice for buyers and beginners: how to spot a reproduction postcard, starting a postcard collection on a budget, and using postcards for family history, from names and postmarks to census records.
This isn't a blog about selling. There are no "rare find" announcements, no price predictions and no investment advice, because old postcards are a pleasure to collect and study, not a market to time. You also won't find stories invented to make a card sound more interesting than it is. When a fact can't be confirmed, it's left out or clearly marked as uncertain.
What you will find is the history that sits behind ordinary cards: who printed them, how they were made, how they traveled through the mail, and what they can still tell us about the places and people they show. If a post helps you date a card in your own drawer, read a faded postmark, or spot a modern copy before you buy it, it has done its job.
If there's a part of postcard history you'd like to read about, a publisher, a printing method, a holiday, a kind of novelty card, or a research question, it may well become a future post. The best subjects are the ones that help many collectors at once, so broad questions are especially welcome.
A new post goes up each week, and the newest always appears at the top of this page. The RSS feed lets you follow along in a feed reader, and the collector's notes hold the longer reference guides that the posts often point back to: dating cards, reading postmarks, identifying real photos, storing a collection, and judging what makes a card valuable.
