Happy New Year Postcards

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With New Year's eve just around the corner I want to share a couple of New Year postcards with you from the New Year's page on my website, MoodysPostcards. The first shows a Jester standing on a fingernail moon singing as Father Time holds the earth, a sickle and an hour glass. This is an artist signed postcard by H. B. Griggs, a well known and excellent postcard illustrator.
The second postcard is a humorous reminder of the danger of overdoing the alcohol intake while celebrating with an elf, or gnome, passed out on a keg of ale while a pig looks on with a smile on his face. I want to wish everyone a safe, healthy and prosperous New Year and thank you for your support!!

Unusual Christmas Card

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I thought I would try to find some unusual Christmas postcards rather than the usual Santa or kids at the Christmas tree. This is one with superior art work showing a cherub waiting for a train with a packed suitcase, presents, a holly wreath on her head and mistletoe at her feet. Enjoy and Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to all! You can see all of my postcards on my website at Moodys Postcards.

The P. T. Barnum Institute of Science & History

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I want to share with you today the Barnum Institute of Science and History in Bridgeport Connecticut. P. T. Barnum originally contracted for and provided the funds, $100,000, and land for this building which would house the Bridgeport Scientific Society and the Fairfield County Historical Society and was completed in 1893. It originally served as a resource library and lecture hall and the Wright brothers and Thomas Edison spoke there. The building was designed to have commercial properties on the first floor which would provide income to sustain the operation but no businesses ever utilized the space. This led to financial hardship which combined with the Great Depression in the 1930s led both societies to cease operations.
The City of Bridgeport took over ownership in 1933 and opened the Barnum Museum in 1936. The city closed the building in 1943 for remodeling and reopened it in 1946 as a city hall annex with the third floor used for displaying collections from the now defunct societies. In 1965, all the city offices were removed, the building was repaired and operations were resumed in 1968 as the P. T. Barnum Museum and was run by city employees.
In 1986, the public-private Barnum Museum Foundation was formed to maintain the Museum and a $7.5 million dollar renovation took place with the Museum being reopened in 1989 with a 7,000 square foot addition. The Museum still operates today so be sure to put it on your "to do" list if you are in the area. This postcard is available in my Connecticut web page listings on my website at Moody's Postcards.

Elaborate County Court House Architecture

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Today I want to share a couple of beautiful County Court Houses from the early 1900s with you. I love these elaborate old buildings which often resemble a fortress or some of the early Armory's. The first example comes from Bridgeport Connecticut and is available in my Connecticut web page listings.

The second postcard is the Ellis County Court House in Waxahachie Texas and is available in my Texas web page listings.

Tis the season for Halloween Postcards

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Halloween is just around the corner and it only fitting that we look at a couple of great Halloween postcards. Halloween is the celebration of All Saints' Day or All Hallows' Eve so now you can see when the name came from. The tradition was brought to the America by the Irish who fled Ireland after the great potato famine of the 1840s. Since the holiday is celebrated around fall harvest time, the traditions are built around pumpkins, apples and harvest scenes. The completion of the harvest was a time when the young single folks thoughts turned to a finding a mate or determining if a girl would marry so the postcards often show couples enjoying the holiday. Rings were baked into cakes and girls would go into gardens to look at the beets and cabbages to find a clue to their future mate. Also contributing to the holiday were the immigrants of Scots-Celtic ancestry who brought with them the poems of Robert Burns and a healthy dose of superstition. Burn's poem "Halloween" shows the holiday as a time for sitting around the fire, telling ghost stories, fortune telling, drinking and couples matching up and sneaking off into the night. His "Tam O' Shanter" story is a great Halloween tale complete with witches, the devil and a scary night. These are a couple of reasons Robert Burns is known as the father of Halloween.
Almost 100 publishers, mostly American, but including English and German companies produced more than 3,000 different Halloween postcards. The premier Halloween postcard publisher was John Winsch from Stapleton New York who began producing postcards in 1910 and the 1911 & 1912 copyrighted postcards are among the best sellers. The Halloween postcards by the artist Samuel L Schmucker, who is considered an Art Nouveau artist, are among the most sought after and command high prices ranging from $70 to over $1,000. The following card from my Halloween Postcard web page is an excellent example of a Winsch Halloween postcard done by the artist Samuel Schmucker.

The second illustration from my website is a beautiful young lady in a Halloween costume complete with a mask and Jack-O-Lanterns around the border.

Postcards featuring unusual buildings Part 10

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Today's unusual building postcard is a great early view of "The Funny Place" on the new Steeplechase Pier in Atlantic City New Jersey which claimed to have the world's largest electric sign with 27,000 light bulbs advertising Chesterfield Cigarettes. George C. Tilyou developed the pier in 1908 and modeled from his amusement park of the same name at Coney Island in New York. Some of the better know rides available at the Atlantic City site were the Flying Chairs that swung out over the ocean, the Mexican Hat Bowl and the Sugar Bowl Slide. This is a great postcard showing the boardwalk and the basket chairs pushed by local young men. This postcard can be seen in my New Jersey listings along with 10,000 additional postcards on my website at Moody's Postcards.

Postcards featuring unusual buildings Part 9

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Today's unusual building postcard goes a little deeper into the subject with a view of the interior of the Y. M. C. A. in Omaha Nebraska. I feature the exterior of a lot of old buildings because of their beautiful or unusual design but this exterior is not that impressive.
So today I wanted to show you this interior to give you an idea of the beauty inside these older buildings. The 15 foot ceilings with massive wooden beams resting on 12 foot marble columns in cavernous rooms with chandeliers are not what you expect to see in a Y.M.C.A. in these days. Both of the postcards can be seen in my Nebraska listings along with 10,000 more postcards on my website at Moody's Postcards.

Postcards featuring unusual buildings Part 8

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"They don't make them like they use to" is a familiar saying now and our postcard of the day illustrates what they are talking about. Most of the schools today are one or two stories covered in red brick and look more like a big ranch style house than schools. The folks in Helena Montana knew how to build a school that could hold up under all kinds of weather, keep the kids safe and look beautiful. Check out the detail around the entrance and windows and the steep roof to keep that winter snow off the roof top. This circa 1909 school was a work of art and can be seen in my Montana listings along with 10,000 more postcards on my website at Moody's Postcards.

Postcards featuring unusual buildings Part 7

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The postcard of the day is the most unusual hotel I have seen and it has been a fixture in South Atlantic City, Margate City, New Jersey since it was built in 1881 and you can still visit it today.
James Lafferty, Jr. built the Elephant Hotel, later nicknamed “Lucy”, to attract prospective buyers to the area where he owned property he wanted to sell and even took out a patent on the idea. He claimed it cost $38,000 to construct but by 1887 he was overextended and sold the Hotel and other property to Anton Gertzen. Anton died in 1902 and the six-story hotel was sold to his son John who charged visitors a dime to tour the interior and climb the spiral stairway to the observatory on its back. In 1902 the hotel was leased as a summer home and in 1903 a hurricane damaged the structure, which was then moved farther back from the beach. At that time it was converted into a tavern and in 1904 almost burned down when patrons knocked over an oil lantern and ended Lucy’s use as a tavern.
When John died in 1916, his wife Sophie took over the property and ran a rooming house nearby and still sold tours for a dime. When prohibition was repealed in 1933, Sophie began an old-fashioned beer garden and named it the Elephant Café. Due to her age, Sophie sold the Café after WWII but retained the Elephant and several years later repurchased the Elephant Café and converted it into the Elephant Hotel.
Sophia died in 1963 and the business passed to her children who ran the hotel and the famous Elephant Lucy as a tourist attraction until 1970. They donated Lucy to the City of Margate, sold the land to developers and retired to Florida. The city raised the money ($9,000)to move Lucy and prepare the new site ($15,000) two blocks away on city property. Historic preservation was helped when the “Save Lucy Committee” received a New Jersey non-profit status and was declared a tax-deductible entity under the Internal Revenue Code. In 1971 the Hotel was added to the National Register of Historic Places. Restoration began in 1973 and continues today with over $600,000 being raised by the Save Lucy Committee to date.
STATISTICS: 58 feet tall; Elephant’s trunk is 21 feet long; 1 million pieces of wood, 250 kegs of nails, six tons of bolts and 13,400 square feet of tin (to cover the body) required in construction. This postcard can be found in my New Jersey listings along with more than 10,000 additional postcards available on my website at Moody's Postcards.
Complete information may be found at www.lucytheelephant.org

Postcards featuring unusual buildings Part 6

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Today I will continue the series on unusual buildings starting with the Fountain Spring House, Metropolitan Church Association, in Waukesha Wisconsin. This is a circa 1908 postcard that shows a huge hotel that covers several city blocks.
History shows Colonel Richard Dunbar’s brush with death in 1868 and seeming salvation by Bethesda’s springs healing waters initiated Waukesha’s Spring Era. Dunbar had been given six weeks to live by his doctor when he drank from the spring and “was cured”. He named the spring Bethesda, bought a half interest in the property and began selling the “miracle cure” which won medals at Paris, St. Louis and San Francisco World Fairs. The original Fountain Spring House was constructed on 140 acres and formally opened July 4th 1874 to satisfy the huge demand by tourists who flocked to Waukesha to partake of the miracle water. In 1878, the hotel burned but was rebuilt, bigger and better than before and became a great landmark and THE place to see and be seen.
By 1905, the Waukesha Hygeia Mineral Spring Company, which had bought the spring in 1891, was bankrupt due to the modern skepticism regarding “miracle cures”, social and cultural changes and the automobile. The Metropolitan Church Association bought the famous Fountain Spring House and owned the hotel until 1956 when it was sold to a real estate firm who demolished it to make way for an apartment complex. This postcard is available in my Wisconsin listings, along with more than 10,000 additional postcards, available on my website at Moody’s Postcards.

Unusual Labor Day Postcard

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Tomorrow is Labor Day so today's postcard will support that occasion and shows the citizens of Butte Montana filling the streets for the unveiling of the Marcus Daly monument on Labor Day. Who was Marcus Daly, why did he deserve a monument and what did he have to do with Labor Day you ask. Marcus Daly was born in Derrylea Ireland in 1841, shortly before the potato famine devastated the area. Daly was just 15 when he fled the area in 1856 and arrived in New York little money, education or skills and no prospects. He did odd jobs for 5 years until he had enough money to buy passage to San Francisco by way of Panama. He worked a a ranch hand, logger and railroad worker and then took up mining and worked in one of the silver mines of the Comstock Lode in Virginia City Nevada. While there, he met George Hearst, father of Randolph Hearst, who later became one of his financial backers.
In 1871 Daly became a foreman for Walker Brothers, a banking and mining group, in Salt Lake City. It was here he met and married his wife, started his family and became a U.S. citizen. In 1876, he was sent by Walker Brothers to Butte Montana to check out the silver producing Alice Mine which he bought for the Walkers and kept a 1/5th interest for himself. He moved to Butte to manage the mine and ended up selling his share and bought the Anaconda mining claim from the owner who could not afford the equipment to operate the mine. George Hearst and his associates provided backing to Daly to buy the silver mine and shortly thereafter a huge copper vein was discovered that was 300 feet deep and 100 feet wide. Electricity was just taking hold of America and copper was in high demand making Daly a rich man. He built his own smelter so he didn't have to ship the copper to the Wales to be processed, built the town of Anaconda to support his workers, bought coal mines to fuel his furnaces, forests to supply his timber, built power plants to supply the mines and established numerous banks and the newspaper Anaconda Standard. By 1890, the copper mines were producing seventeen million dollars worth of copper per year.
But what also set Daly apart was that he treated his employees better than most other owners, gave preferential treatment to new arrivals looking for work, allowed a "closed shop" to operate, urged new employees to join the union and allowed union officers and society members access to the mines. He was also very in helping many different worthy causes. Marcus Daly died in 1900 at the age of 58 and was still one of the major figures in American Industry and was known as the "Copper King". The monument demonstrates the high esteem he was held in by his employees and the town he founded.
This postcard is available in my Montana listings along with more than 10,000 additional postcards on my website at Moody's Postcards.

Postcards featuring unusual buildings Part 5

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As we continue with the "unusual buildings" theme going into the Labor day weekend, I have selected a private residence and a public library. The residence belonged to George M. Pullman, of pullman railroad car fame, and is located on one of the islands in Thousand Islands New York. This bird's eye view brings to mind the old real estate adage of "Location, location, location!" and illustrates just how much this mansion towered over the "humble" homes on the nearby islands. This postcard is available in my New York listings, along with more than 10,000 additional postcards, available on my website at Moody's Postcards.

The public library is a massive building located in Butte Montana with beautiful windows and entrance ways set off from the red stone in white stone work that is masterfully done. Based on the size of the building, all of the books in Montana must have been kept here.This postcard is available in my Montana listings, along with more than 10,000 additional postcards, available on my website at Moody's Postcards.

Postcards featuring unusual buildings Part 4

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Today's "unusual buildings" include a High School and an Armory Gymnasium combination. The High Point North Carolina High School is a 1920s view of a rambling structure that looks more like a beautiful hotel.

The second entrant is the Gymnasium and Armory at the State University in Columbus Ohio and is a massive stone structure with many castle looking features that provide a significant deterrent to any would be attackers. Be sure to check out the other armory postcards in my 21 July 2007 blog. Both of these postcards are available on my website at Moody's Postcards in the North Carloina listings and the Ohio listings.

Postcards featuring unusual buildings Part 3

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The postcards for today are a continuation of the last post on Tonopah Nevada. Last time we showed two postcards with improvised building materials and the two postcards today show two more unique homes built during the great silver rush in the early 1900s. The first is titled the "Tin Can House" and is built of coal oil cans. If fact, if you look at the door on the barrel house in the last blog, it appears to be constructed of the same type cans.

The second house is constructed with bottles and has two dogs guarding the front doors. Both of these postcards are available in my Nevada listings along with more than 10,000 additional postcards available on my website at Moody's Postcards.

Postcards featuring unusual buildings Part 2

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Today I am continuing a feature on unusual buildings and we hit the motherload in Tonopah Nevada. When the gold mines in California quit producing, a miner named James Butler left California and began ranching in Nye County Nevada. His burros wandered off one night and while looking for them he discovered the silver ore. Three months later he finally filed eight claims and six of them turned into some of the biggest produces in the state. He eventually made about $336,000 when he sold the mines but the discovery would eventually produce over $150 million. This great silver rush brought miners from California and Alaska as well as the rest of states and the sudden influx into a barren area with no existing infrastructure created a drastic need for shelter. The first postcard shows some of the makeshift residences that were basically made from whatever was available and built in the mountainside.

The second postcard shows "The Barrel House", with the owners faithful dog at the doorway, which was primarily constructed from empty barrels. Both of these postcards are available in my Nevada listings along with more than 10,000 additional postcards available on my website at Moody's Postcards.

Postcards featuring unusual buildings Part 1

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The postcard of the day comes from Middlesboro Kentucky and features the Chamber of Commerce of this town in the middle of the coal mining area. This is a 1926 postcard that shows the exterior of the building which is built entirely out of coal. After running across this card, I decided to feature several buildings built with unusual materials in the next few blogs. This postcard is available in my Kentucky listings along with more than 10,000 additional postcards available on my website at Moody's Postcards.

Part 2 Hot Springs National Park Arkansas

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One interesting part of the history of the Hot Springs Baths is the part African Americans played in the operation AND use of the baths. Before the Civil War, blacks worked throughout the bath houses but after the Civil War, when Jim Crow laws were in effect, blacks were still allowed to work in the bathhouses but did not have free acess to bathing in them. The federal government began providing free baths for poor people after 1878 by building a frame bathhouse over the "mud hole" spring and continued to provide a free segregated bathhouse for indigents until 1956.
In the early 1900s, bathhouses owned and operated by African Americans were opened but the local tradition of segregation continued until 1964 when the Civil Rights Act was passed. In the 1880s black patrons could buy tickets at the Ozark Bathhouse, the Independent Bathhouse and possibly the Rammelsberg Bath House BUT they were not allowed to bathe during the hours considered optimum by prescribing physicians and particularly from 10 AM to 12 noon. The Crystal Bathhouse which opened in 1904 was the first constructed for exclusive use of African Americans. In 1908, the lease was transferred to the Knights of Pythias and in 1913 the Crystal burned in a fire that destroyed 50 city blocks.
The Pythian was built on the site of the Crystal Bathhouse by the Knights of Pythias of North America, South America, Europe, Asia, Africa and Australia, an insurance organization, and opened in December 1914.
In the early 1920s, the Woodmen of the Union, a fraternal insurance company, built the Woodmen of the Union Building which was the primary health care facility for the African American community and included a hospital, doctor and dental offices and a bathhouse since other medical facilities in the city were for whites only. The hospital treated members free and also treated black indigent patients referred from other health care facilities in Hot Springs. The African American National Baptist Convention bought the Woodmen of the Union Building in 1948 and spent 2 years remodeling it.
Other than management, the mainstay of the bath industry from early times was the bath attendant and until the 1980s, most were African American. Massage services were added in some bathhouses in the 1893 and later chiropodists (for bathers' foot problems). By the early 1900s, all bathhouses offered massage.
The first two postcards below show the men's area of the bathhouse with one showing black attendants (postcard printed in 1931) while the other has white attendants (printed in 1923).
All of these postcards are available on my website at Moody's Postcards.
The last two postcards below show the ladies area of the bathhouse and do NOT show black attendants BUT the first postcard was printed in 1913 and the second one is a reprint of the first one (date of reprint unknown) with the caption "White Attendants" added.

Hot Springs National Park Arkansas Part 1

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The postcards of the day are of the Army and Navy Hospital at the Hot Springs National Park in Arkansas and show the original hospital and the 1930s version. American Indians lived in the area now included in the park boundaries around 3,000 years ago and in 1818, a treaty with the Quapaw Indians conveyed the territory containing the hot springs to the United States. The federal government reserved the hot springs in 1832 and the Quapaw Indians continued to visit and use the baths. In 1922, the Quapaw bathhouse was opened and the Indians were among their customers. The springs include 47 hot springs and their watershed that flow from the southwestern slope of Hot Springs Mountain.
The federal reservation eventually developed into a widely known resort and was often called "The American Spa". It attracted not only the wealthy but also the poor from around the world who came to improve their health. Early wooden structures were a fire hazard and were replaced by a row of stone and masonry bathhouses along Central Avenue in the early 1900s. People have used the hot spring water to treat rheumatism and other aliments for more than 200 hundred years.
The first postcard is a circa 1905 view of the Army and Navy Hospital and will soon be added to my website.
The second postcard is a 1933 view of the new and improved Army and Navy Hospital and will also be added to the website soon.
I will continue this discussion in my next blog but in the meantime be sure to check out my website, MoodysPostcards.

Military Armory Buildings Through the Years

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An armory is a military depot normally used for training of local military and storage of weapons and ammunition. There are many postcards showing the local armory in the early 1900s and they are still seen today for the local National Guard and Reserves. The early 1900 versions often resembled castles complete with turrets but without the moats. The first postcard below shows the state armory, which was built in 1908, in Ionia Michigan and is a formidable sight.

The second postcard shows the armory in Kenton Ohio circa 1912 and it has the true castle appearance.NOTE: All of these postcards are currently available on my website Moodys Postcards.

The third postcard shows a 1940s style armory in Lewiston Maine and it is a whopper with a more modern design.