Mii-dera Temple, Ōtsu, Japan

Old photo, circa 1900 – 1910s.

Price:  $15.00            Size:  5 and 3/8 x 3″

Mii-dera Temple, also called Onjo-ji Temple…..

A Buddhist temple that was established in the 7th Century as a, “Uji-dera Temple (temple built for praying clan’s glory),” and one of the four largest temples in Japan. The view we see looks east toward the city of Otsu and Lake Biwa (the largest lake in Japan). There are some people appearing in this photo, as well – four men, one seemingly gazing up toward the person taking the photo.

Sources:  Onjo-ji Temple. https://www.japanese-wiki-corpus.org/shrines/Onjo-ji%20Temple.html (accessed August 16, 2022).

Mii-dera. n.d. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mii-dera (accessed August 16, 2022).

Bluebirds for F. E. Cadwell

Postcard postmarked September 28, 1917 from Worcester, Massachusetts. Publisher unknown. Series or number 1020.

Price:  $7.00

A pretty lake scene done in mostly vertical lines. You might expect to see an artist’s signature at the bottom, but no…..just the sentiments, Many Happy Returns.

Addressed to:   “Mr. F. E. Cadwell, 17 Brigham Park, Fitchburg, Mass.”

The sender wrote:   “Congratulations – When are you coming over. Thought you would be here before this – No news with me. Ernest & family still on their vacation in N. H. – Love Flora – “

Per the 1917 Fitchburg city directory, F. E. is Fred E. Cadwell (Fitchburg Produce Co.) It’s not stated whether he is the owner of this company or an employee. Per marriage and census records he was born in Enfield, MA about 1870, and married Eda Commings June 23, 1891.

Sources:  The Price & Lee Co.’s Fitchburg Directory 1917, p. 162. Ancestry.com. U.S. City Directories, 1822-1995.

Year: 1920; Census Place: Fitchburg Ward 5, Worcester, Massachusetts; Roll: T625_746; Page: 2A; Enumeration District: 61. (Ancestry.com).

Town and City Clerks of Massachusetts. Massachusetts Vital and Town Records. Provo, UT: Holbrook Research Institute (Jay and Delene Holbrook). (Ancestry.com).

Mrs. Minnie Perreault

Old photo, circa 1930s, white border.

Price:  $10.00        Size:  2 and 3/4 x 4 and 1/2″

Continuing with a very short theme of “woman with oar or paddle” 🙂 here’s a photo circa 1930s, and we’re guessing (though not certain) that the woman in the canoe is the “Mrs. Minnie Perreault” as written on the back. She was the wife of Ludger Perreault, and their address given is 479 Ann St., Hartford, CT. The 1930 Federal Census for Hartford shows them at this address, along with their daughter Lillian, age 9, with several lodgers living also in the household. This photo was found in a box of loose photos at the vintage paper fair recently visited in San Francisco.

Source:  Year: 1930; Census Place: Hartford, Hartford, Connecticut; Page: 3A; Enumeration District: 0039; FHL microfilm: 2339999. (Ancestry.com).

Fishing From Pier In Lake Michigan

Divided back postcard, postmarked August 18, 1911, Chicago, Illinois. Number or series 575.

Price:  $6.00

Imagine today, fishing off a pier attired in a suit coat and bowler hat! Pretty cool. It’s t-shirts and baseball caps now, though. But it’s a nice card from an unknown publisher. And it may have been one of the type where the original image was a photo that appeared in a newspaper, that subsequently got tinted and made into postcards. Funny that you can read some letters on the folded newspaper that is sticking out of the jacket pocket of the young gent on the left. Wonder if that was something the postcard producer did, and I’m thinking yes, because otherwise you wouldn’t be able to tell what it was supposed to be. (This is like “…inside the mind of…circa 1911”  type of thing. But not necessarily an idle thought since we know from prior research that photo images were often altered for postcard use.)

Addressed to:   “Miss Lela Hartman. 141 Hancock St. Newark, Ohio.”

The sender writes:  “Hello Lela – How are you getting along? Having a good time playing with Alice and Tom? How would you like to go fishing in Lake Michigan? Wouldn’t that be fun? Love from ‘Annie.’ “

Lela A. Hartman is only about four years old when she receives this postcard from Annie, who is probably one of her playmates. She is the daughter of Herman H. and Maude W. (Powers) Hartman. All are native to Ohio. Herman on the 1910 Federal Census is a mounter at a stove factory.

Sources:  Year: 1910; Census Place: Newark Ward 3, Licking, Ohio; Roll: T624_1204; Page: 3A; Enumeration District: 0088; FHL microfilm: 1375217. (Ancestry.com).

Original data: Indiana, Marriages, 1810-2001. Salt Lake City, Utah: FamilySearch, 2013. (Ancestry.com).

Forget-me-nots and Seagulls

Divided back, embossed postcard. Postmarked May 11, 1913 from Elwood, Nebraska. Series or number G10.

Price:  $5.00

“Only a message sweet and true

Saying I think today of you.”

Addressed to:   “Miss Lena Davis, Almena Kans.”

“May 10       Dear Cousin, We are all well having fine weather. I have 109 little chicks my housecleaning done and garden planted. The wheat look fine. Fred is listing corn he has been sick but better now. The boys grow fast and play out doors all the time. From Your Cousin Alice.”

Have been away from posts (alas) for some time. This seems to be a common refrain lately (sigh). Anyway! Here’s one from our Lena Davis Collection (hey, Lena 🙂 ) of a beautiful sunset on a lake (lake as in Great Lakes comes to mind, being a Michigander) with sailboat, seagulls and is partially framed by forget-me-nots. Flipping to the back to read the message from Lena’s cousin Alice, we jump from lakeside to a rural farm setting of chicks, wheat and corn……What woman cannot relate to this sense of accomplishment,  “I have my 109 little chicks, housekeeping done and garden planted.”  Time to kick back on the front porch with an ice-cold lemonade (while of course, keeping an eye on the boys, ever-multi-tasking 😉  ).

And, yes, Fred is really “listing” corn. He would have used a piece of farm equipment similar to the one pictured below, planting the kernels in the furrows (the ditches) so the corn could root deeper in the soil and the roots could be covered later, thus protecting them in times of drought.

Source:  Widtsoe, John Andreas. Dry Farming:  A System of Agriculture for Counties Under Low Rain Fall. New York:  The McMillan Company, 1911. (archive.org).

Loch Lomond By E. Longstaffe

Postcard, unused. Artist-signed by E. Longstaffe. Publisher unknown. Circa 1904 -1905.

Price:  $5.00

Continuing with our short excursion to Scotland….an artist-signed card by English landscape painter, Edgar Longstaffe (1852 – 1933). The few others currently for sale online are dated from 1904 and 1905 (though were put out by other publishers). This particular offering is not in the best shape – the layers of paper comprising the card are starting to peel away from each other, but since Scotland had seemed to be a somewhat neglected area of my collection, I was happy to find this card and include it here.

Source:  Edgar Longstaffe. n.d. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edgar_Longstaffe (accessed August 8, 2018).

French Waterman, Goulais Lake, Algoma Co., Ontario

Vintage photos, circa 1940s – 1952, deckled edge border.

Price for the set of two:  $15.00

“French and guide at launch place”  or possibly “at lunch place.” That is probably French Waterman on our left and either his unidentified fishing guide, center (or, if some humor was employed in the description, French’s dad, Warren…just a possibility, no assumptions.) On the canoe bow, we see what may be the manufacturer logo of a circle and one wing. Maybe someone familiar with vintage canoes will recognize it. (Click on the image to enlarge.)

 

French is John French Waterman, born about 1904 in Tennessee, younger son of Warren Gookin Waterman, Sr., born in Southport, Connecticut 1872 and died in Frankfort, Michigan 1952 and Anna (Hannah Meuller) Waterman. Warren, Sr. may have taken the shots (we hope, or was in the top one, even better, but either way, these photos seem to be a remembrance from a nice father-son trip!) and written on the back, along with stamping his address at that time:

“W. G. Waterman, Riverbend Farm, Frankfort, Michigan”

French Waterman at Goulais Lake Camps, Algoma County, Ontario. There’s French, we believe, on our far right, blending in a little with the background. In the center, nestled in the pines, one of the sixteen guest cabins. Here is Goulais Lake from a Google map search.

Sources:  Year: 1920; Census Place: Evanston Ward 7, Cook, Illinois; Roll: T625_358; Page: 10A; Enumeration District: 87; Image: 533. (Ancestry.com)

Original data: Michigan, Marriage Records, 1867–1952. Michigan Department of Community Health, Division for Vital Records and Health Statistics. (Ancestry.com)

Year: 1940; Census Place: Crystal Lake, Benzie, Michigan; Roll: T627_1730; Page: 2B; Enumeration District: 10-9. (Ancestry.com)

Goulais Lake, Algoma, Unorganized, North Part, ON, Canada. Google.com map search. Accessed July 2, 2017.

Find A Grave memorial# 36874914. Findagrave.com. Accessed July 2, 2017.

Houseboat Heaven

Vintage photo, circa 1920s – 1930s.

Price:  $6.00         Size:  4 and 1/4 x 2 and 5/8″

Three ladies

I love houseboats:  There is something so romantic about them (riverboats, too.) So “houseboat heaven” came to mind immediately upon finding the photo, and the term stuck (and never got unstuck, lol. That’s redundant but, no matter.) But I realize, as I’m posting this, that the watercraft in question could be something other than the type involved in my (just now identified) longing to set up house on the water or meander down a river in rustic comfort. Rather than houseboat, the vessel could be a small ferry….In any case, the image shows a woman posed, relaxing on an inside railing, smiling for the camera. On our left we see a partial view of the woman’s friend, in flounced dress, her hand on one of the thin uprights. You get the feeling she’s chatting with someone outside of the picture. Both ladies are elegantly dressed. And the vessel….is charming:  nothing too fancy, wooden, with her “house” portion curving around, and a shallow, covered deck off of the house, as part of the bigger deck surface as a whole. Note the nice scroll work above the door and the scalloped roof edging….All-in-all, a beautifully captured moment, from a casually elegant or elegantly casual 😉 evening spent on the water, with good friends. (That includes the boat!)

Grand River Dam And Lake, Northeastern Oklahoma

Divided back, unused postcard. Publisher:  Dewey Post Card Co., Dewey, Oklahoma. Printer:  Curt Teich. Genuine Curteich – Chicago. “C. T. American Art.” No. or series:  2B88 – N. Circa 1953.

Price:  $5.00

“Length of dam 5680 ft., height 150 ft., length of lake 60 miles with 1000 miles shoreline. A playground of four states. Power plant capacity 200,000,000 KWH. Four 20,000 h. p. turbines, four 16,000 KVA generators.”

There’s a few similar-view-of-the-dam linen postcards that we see online, however none at the moment by this publisher, the Dewey Post Card Co. Per the publisher research we’re estimating the date of this postcard at 1953.

The Grand River Dam is an a.k.a. for the Pensacola Dam, in Northeastern Oklahoma, which is the longest multiple-arch dam in the world. Construction was started in 1938 and completed in 1940.

Source:  Pensacola Dam. n.d. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pensacola_Dam (accessed June 12, 2017).

A Japanese Postcard

A Japanese Postcard pc1A Japanese Postcard pc2

Divided back, unused vintage postcard.

Price:  $5.00

A Japanese art scene in black and grey showing a seaside home, nestled under a stand of trees, with a sailboat just offshore.

The Japanese characters appearing on the back of this unused postcard were translated by the student of a friend (thank you!) The characters are to be read right to left, which indicated to the translator that this is not a modern era postcard, and are in Kanji, which is one of the three forms of Japanese script and the one that uses an adaptation of Chinese. So, reading from the right hand side it says “mail” and then “postcard.”

“Union Postale Universelle. Carte Postale”  or in English Universal Postal Union (UPU)  “is a specialized agency of the United Nations that coordinates postal policies among member nations, in addition to the worldwide postal system.” (Wikipedia)

The UPU was established in 1874 as a result of the Treaty of Bern, and was first called the “General Postal Union.” Just four years later the name changed to it’s present day moniker. But the need for such an agency arose due to the complexities involved in sending international mail. Prior to the UPU, each country had to draw up a separate postal treaty to deal with the other nations, as well as calculate postage for each leg of the mail’s journey, and then sometimes had to engage mail forwarders when there was no direct delivery in the intended recipient country.

Source:  Universal Postal Union. n.d. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Postal_Union. (accessed March 15, 2015).