Georgia Postcards
Agriculture and Industry
Georgia, like other southern states, was predominantly rural and agricultural in the early decades of the twentieth century, and cotton was preeminently the crop of the region. The state’s economy was to a large extent dependent upon the success of the year’s crop, and fortunes could, and frequently did, rest on such variables as rain or lack of it, and after 1913 on the boll weevil. The post
card views of cotton fields, gins, and compresses, and of town squares and city streets jammed with wagon loaded with bales, leave no doubt as to the importance of cotton. Small towns sometimes measured themselves against other small towns by how many gins they had. Farmers competed with one another for the distinction of bringing in the year’s first bale. One of the cards included here records for us the date
on which W.A. Brannon delivered two hundred bales of cotton to Newnan.
There were other crops that were a part of the Georgia economy - peaches, for instance, especially the Elberta peach, famous long before anyone had heard of the Vidalia onion. Corn was one of the major crops in the early 1900s. Many of the state’s farmers grew sugarcane. Steamboats carried cotton, naval stores and other agricultural products down the Chattahoochee, Flint, Savannah, Coosa, Ocmulgee, Oconee, Altamaha and other Georgia rivers to ports at New Orleans, Apalachicola, Darien, Brunswick and Savannah.
Eighty-five percent of the state’s population lived on farms or outside towns and cities in 1900. But the movement from the farms to small towns and from the small towns to the cities had already begun, and Georgia would become slowly but increasingly more industrial with iron manufacturing in Columbus and canning in Darien among many other large and small manufacturing operations being built around the state.
A Brief History of Post Cards
Just after entering the twentieth century, the United States was swept up in the worldwide craze of post card collecting that had begun in Europe several years earlier. What had started as a cheap, convenient form of communication soon evolved into a popular pastime for nearly everyone. Collectors traded cards from town to town, from state to state, and eventually from country to country. Post card collecting reached almost fanatical proportions, and the cards were sometimes bought and exchanged under unusual and even amusing circumstances. For example, when rural folk, who comprised the vast majority of the population at that time, went into town for weekly or monthly provisions, they might mail cards back home to friends, other family members, or even to themselves. The cards would arrive the day after - or the day after the day after they returned home!
The larger towns, and in many of the smaller towns as well, the cards were sold in drugstores, and indeed the town drugstore was frequently the publisher or the sponsor of the views. This no doubt explains why so many of these stores are seen in the views of main¬¬ streets and business sections: the post card was, or could be, an inexpensive means of advertising. The post cards could also be found in stationery stores and bookstores as well as in hotels and railroad stations. Those passing through the state by rail might leave the train during its stop in Macon or Atlanta to buy and mail cards to family at home or to fellow collectors. Cards postmarked in the city that was the subject of the view were particularly sought after. There were collectors who specialized and who might collect nothing except views of depots and railroad terminals. Others collected main streets or courthouses or state capitols.
Cards were collected, traded, stored away in boxes, and displayed in fancy albums that oftentimes lay alongside the family Bible on the parlor table. There were even wooden hearth screens that held cards - the perfect addition to the already crowded Edwardian parlor. The hobby became so popular that in 1909 one national post card collectors club based in Philadelphia boasted of having ten thousand members. In England, Queen Victoria became enamored of the hobby and had a member of her family establish a collection for her.
The history of picture post cards goes back to the 1860s and the appearance of the first “postal cards,” which were issued by a government agency and had the postage stamp imprinted on them. “Post cards,” on the other hand, were privately produced, with the postage stamp affixed by the sender. The first government-issued postal card was introduced in Austria in 1869. One side was reserved for the address and the other provided space for a short message. Public response was overwhelming. The governments of England, Germany and Switzerland began issuing postal cards in 1870, and more than a dozen other countries followed within the next five years, including Canada in1871 and the United States two years later. Over sixty million of the United States government issues of 1873 were sold within six months. Widespread publication of private post cards was yet to come, however.
The U.S. Post Office had anticipated that the postal cards would be used for “orders, invitations, notices, receipts, acknowledgements, price lists and other requirements of business and social life,” and many businesses seized the opportunity to use the cards for advertising. One interesting use to which the cards were put occurred in Baker County, Georgia, where the warden of the prison there used them to inform other law enforcement officers across the state of the escape of prisoners. Some individuals took it upon themselves to embellish the government-issued cards with decorative symbols and figures to make them more attractive. There are even some examples of this practice in the United States. From this beginning, the picture post card eventually evolved.
As early as 1870, small designs were added to some of the postal cards, and in 1872 a card was produced in Vienna that had an illustration that occupied the entire address side of the card. The first real picture post cards available in quantity for public use were printed by a Paris newspaper in conjunction with the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1889. The cards were illustrated with a black and white vignette of the Eiffel Tower completed earlier that year and were sold at the base of the tower as mementos of the occasion. This event was probably the inspiration for the production of the first picture post cards in the United States - souvenirs of the World Columbian Exposition held in Chicago in1893. The beautifully colored views of the Chicago exposition proved to be extremely popular and helped lead the way to the passage of an 1898 law permitting “Private Mailing Cards” with the same one-cent postage rate and mailing privileges as government issues.
After the success of the Columbian Exposition issues, several companies began limited production of views of larger towns in the late 1890s. This merely whetted the public’s appetite for such cards. Commercial companies, large and small, as well as private entrepreneurs began a great rush to supply the demand. In 1902 the Eastman Kodak Company contributed greatly to the movement when it introduced postcard-sized paper on which photographs could be printed from negatives. This idea was soon duplicated by several Kodak competitors and the product was distributed widely. Subsequent improvements in the process enabled amateurs to produce their own post cards.
Most of the post cards from the early 1900s, however, are color lithographs that were printed in Europe, many of the best of them produced in Germany. The process frequently involved painstaking work with as many as seven or eight or even ten different lithographic stones - one for each shade of color, which explains the delicate coloring to be found in the best of them. Some of the cards from this period were printed in black and white and then individually colored by hand. Because of these printed views are not actual photographs, but color reproductions of photographs, they have too often been undervalued or even dismissed as ephemera. Those who downplay the cards overlook the fact that they began as photographs and serve much the same purpose - and that with the passage of time they have become historical documents. All too often, the photographs from which the lithographs were made have been lost. But the cards survive because they were produced in large numbers.
The cards tell us a great deal more than what the town’s first post office looked like, or the school long since gone, or the courthouse that burned in 1907. They are an index to the town’s attitudes and social values - to its view of itself. What did it consider important? Did it concern itself only with the “progress” that was given such emphasis in the early years of the century, or were there moments of contemplation and reflection? And what were the individuals who sent these post cards saying to each other?
One of the attractions of the cards of course was that there was very little space in which to write and thus the purpose of a letter could be served in a few short sentences or phrases. During the early years, one side of the card was reserved for the address only, which meant that the messages had to be written on the picture side of the card. This explains why so many early cards were defaced by the sender. A 1907 law allowed the use of a “divided back,” so that the address and the message could be placed on the same side. Because of the limited space, a kind of post card shorthand developed: “Having grand time,” “Used to have a girl here,” “Arrived this eve,” “Roads near impossible.” No longer was it necessary to start a sentence in the customary way, or even complete one. Spelling fell by the wayside. “Staid here last nite,” “Hello Rosanelle - if your name is not spelt right I can’t help it.” The people who scrawled these notes seem to have been in a hurry. “In a few days we will be at home if we don’t run the wheels off,” writes one of the senders.
While 1898 to 1918 is considered to be the period of greatest popularity for picture post cards worldwide, the American golden age of these cards was from 1905 to 1915. It was during this decade that photography and printing reached a point of excellence that permitted the production of high-quality cards that could be mass-produced cheaply. As important, the Rural Free Delivery system devised by the U. S. Post Office Department in 1898 came into its own. Until them, only 25 percent of U.S. citizens lived in towns with populations of ten thousand or more, which made them eligible for home mail delivery. Those living in smaller towns had to retrieve their mail at the post office, and those living in the country had to make periodic trips into the nearest town to get theirs. Now, by petitioning their congressmen, rural residents could receive the same service as their big-city friends. By early 1900s, all but the most remote households could enjoy mail deliveries right to their doors.
After 1915 the collection fad declined and so did the quality of the cards, in part a victim of World War I, which cut off access to Germany and the German printers who had produced so many of the views. But the rise of the telephone and the automobile were also contributing factors.
With the coming of the second decade of the twentieth century, the telephone became less a luxury item than a common household fixture, thereby reducing the value of the postcard as a convenient form of communication. Then too, as more people acquired automobiles, distances narrowed and the need to stay in touch by mail was much less compelling. Post cards would continue to be produced, but they had lost much of their original purpose,
The first picture post cards from Georgia were a set of twelve views commemorating the Cotton States Exposition held in Atlanta in 1895 and sold from vending machines at the exposition. After this event a few black and white views of Savannah and Atlanta were published, but it was not until after the turn of the century that post card views of other Georgia towns were produced. By then the great fad that was already raging in Europe spilled over to the United States, and Georgia was soon as infatuated with post card collecting as the rest of the country.
We are fortunate that Georgians became infected with the “post card fever,” for in the effort to satisfy the demand for more cards almost any scene was fair game for post card manufacturers. Thus, scenes never photographed before were captured on film and reproduced on post cards, and we are richer historically for them. Many of these cards represent the only surviving record of churches, schools, homes, business establishments and public buildings long ago demolished by fire. Even events such as storms, fires, dedications, and reunions - especially reunions of Confederate veterans - are recorded.
Where else would one find a photograph of seventeen friends gathered for Ruth Glasier’s house party at Flat Shoals on August 3, 1908? Or get a look at mule-drawn streetcars plying the dirt streets of Covington, Oxford and Washington early in the century? Or see a picture of a lazy scene in Adel, Georgia, in 1910 with a pig walking down the dirt main street? The value of these views to anyone interested in the history and culture of the state is obvious.
Gary Doster
Gary Doster is a native Athenian with a lifelong interest in Georgia history. He is a certified wildlife biologist and has worked for the Southeastern Cooperative Wildlife Disease Study at the University of Georgia since 1965. Gary is a lifelong collector of Georgia memorabilia and has accumulated more than 10,000 early Georgia picture postcards, the largest such collection in existence. He also has assembled impressive collections of other Georgiana, including obsolete currency, early photographs, old letters, slavery documents and Confederate letters, envelopes and documents.
In addition to scientific articles and book chapters in technical journals, symposia and textbooks related to his work, Gary is the author of seven other books on Georgia history, including from Abbeville to Zebulon, Early Postcard Views of Georgia, published by the University of Georgia Press in 1991, and post card histories of six regions of Georgia, published by Arcadia Publishing in 1998. He is married to the former Faye Ann Thomas of Oconee County.
A postcard picture gallery of early 20th century Georgia agriculture and industry from the collection of Gary Doster, Georgia’s Postcard King, plus a short history of postcards.
Can you tell us about the history or background of any of the Georgia postcards in the gallery?
Have Georgia postcards in your collection that you’d like to share. We’d like to hear from you.
Tags: Georgia history, postcards