Chippewa Valley Museum

Unique leather postcards from the Glenn Curtis Smoot Library and Archives in Eau Claire, WI.

The Chippewa Valley Museum is the sort of place well known in the Eau Claire area for its exhibits documenting daily life in Wisconsin. But the museum is also home to the Glen Smoot Library and Archives, a small but valuable repository tucked away between the exhibits on pioneer life and woodland Indian Tribes. As an undergrad at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, I was a docent at the museum and spent many hours there giving tours to elementary school children. But I never had the opportunity to visit the archives, so when I found out that the museum maintains a collection of postcards, I made sure to visit on my next trip to Eau Clair. Librarian Eldbjorg Tobin was kind enough to take me into the stacks to look at the approximately 1200 postcards they keep, and also allowed me peruse them to my heart's content.

The collection is small but covers a diverse range of postcard topics, styles, and time periods, most have some kind of connection to the region. One of the largest portions of the collection was of lumber-related materials, and I look at dozens and dozens of black and white postcards of lumberjacks and lumber camps from the 1800's through the 1920's.

Every lumber camp needs a mascot. This one has Mr. Tootles.

Popular local sports like ski jumping are also highlighted in this collection.

While many of the postcards had the typical views and vistas that I would expect, I was struck by the idiosyncratic subject matter of some of the cards: A downtown fire in 1915 that destroyed a department store, for example:
Or a group shot of the first WWI volunteers to enlist from August, WI, standing awkwardly on the sidewalk in their street clothes. One that I found particularly odd was a booklet of postcards of scenes from Reims, France, after it was bombed and gutted during WWI. Each postcard highlighted an area of particularly devastating damage. I wondered what the sender might scribble on this one:
"My dear, I saw this pile of rubble that was once a thriving neighborhood and thought of you. Love, Stanley."

But of course, a lot of people (myself included) buy postcards not to send to others but to hold onto a piece of memory: a beautiful painting in a museum, a city view you couldn't possibly achieve with your little Canon Powershot, an event you didn't witness but holds personal significance. These postcards are compelling to me because they come from the same community I grew up in and spent the first years of my adulthood. I found myself pulling out postcard after postcard to look at and photograph because they held connections, however tangential, to my own life and history. I stood there wondering what made someone think a certain street, a certain view was important enough to print and sell - and what made someone pick it up and buy it? What made someone save it for decades?

Perhaps most important of all, I left wondering: what kind of things can we learn about community identity from the buying and selling, sending and saving of images?

The building to the right to the distant trolley car was my last apartment in Eau Claire.

Thanks to the Chippewa Valley Museum Librarian, Eldbjorg Tobin.
http://www.cvmuseum.com/Library1.html


Entry compiled by: Kaitlin Dunn.