The Mazomanie Historical Society

Mazomanie is a small village about 45 minutes west of downtown Madison with claims to fame concerning railroads and electricity. As a stop on the first rail line to cross Wisconsin, the village served as an important service center for over 25 years. Mazomanie was also an early adopter of electricity; the village was first lit in 1885, which was before Madison. These are just a couple things I learned about Mazomanie when I visited the village’s historical society and museum on a rainy Saturday morning in late October.





I was lucky enough to meet with Bob Dodsworth, who founded the Mazomanie Historical Society in 1966. Bob explained that the historical society and the library, while independent entities, share a building that used to be the railroad depot. The structure was built by the Milwaukee and Mississippi Railroad Company in 1857, and it was restored to its original form in 1993, which was when it began its new life as a library and research center.

The Mazomanie Historical Society also maintains a museum, which is housed in a building that served as an electrical generation plant in its first life. Today the museum consists of four rooms and an attached jail (no longer in use!), and displays permanent exhibits about Mazomanie’s settlement and development, as well as rotating exhibits.

The Mazomanie Historical Society has over 500 postcards, which I was permitted to leaf through and examine. Bob Dodsworth said the postcards have been slowly trickling in since he founded the society in 1966, and that today some are even found on eBay. The collection really does run the gamut, though there are some repeaters—the high school, in particular, seemed to be a popular choice.

On the back of the above postcard (stamped 1908), someone wrote a note to the receiver; the sender and the receiver must have attended together.

Various downtown views of Mazomanie were also popular postcards.

Above is a postcard, dated 1911, showing a Mazomanie street car traveling through downtown.

And here are another couple views of downtown. The upper is dated 1910, and the lower is undated.

Here is the Mazomanie Public Library and Historical Society Research Center in its previous incarnation as a busy railroad depot, 1909.

Sometimes the postcards took a more serious turn, such as these that depict the damage done by two deadly tornados.

This postcard of Hitler is one that offered no clues on the back about where it came from.

And, to end on a more lighthearted note, here is proof (in case anyone has forgotten) that photo doctoring was possible pre-Photoshop! On the back, the sender wrote to the receiver that he thought the corn was “grown near where you grew up.”

Special thanks to Bob Dodsworth for welcoming me to the Mazomanie Historical Society, filling me in on its origins and collections, and giving a personal tour of the museum!

Images of postcards courtesy of the Mazomanie Historical Society.

Entry compiled by Marisa Hirsch.

Seeking Meaning in Context

Recently, I met with Andy Kraushaar, the visual materials curator at the Wisconsin Historical Society, to discuss his postcard collection. When we met, I was hoping that I would discover a collection of postcards with a story behind it, especially, in the archival sense, a provenancial story. As our meeting and discussion progressed, however, the difference of visual materials became clear to me once again. Images have an appeal that defies original order. People collect and exchange them for their own sake. Historically this has resulted in images often being removed from their context in archival collections and organized for subject-based access. It has also resulted in what archivists call artificial collections, an assemblage of chosen items rather than a group organically accumulated as the byproduct of a function.

Yet with people’s affinity for narrative and story, there is always a story. In Andy’s collection of postcards, the story that emerged for me was part of the history of photography. Before the widespread mechanical reproduction of images, hobbyists and professionals produced photos through painstaking and sometimes toxic methods, images are that compelling. In the history of postcards, the real-photo postcard preceded the mass-produced postcard. In other words, people mailed the original prints themselves with messages and stamps affixed to the back. For a time, Kodak produced photo-printing paper with postcard graphical conventions on the back like the separating line down the middle. The high-fidelity of actual photographs came casually and sweetly in the mail.

Andy has collected a number of real photo postcards mainly for their compelling and unusual composition. We looked at a number of them on his Flickr photostream. As I browsed through them, I simply wondered. What did this mean to people? Who are those people? Who made that and who did they send it to? Find a few of my favorites below.

Find more real photo postcards in Andy Kraushar’s photo stream on Flickr by searching for his user name akrausha and the tag rppc for real photo postcards. There are currently 214 in the collection.

Images Courtesy of: Andy Kraushar.

Special thanks to Andy Kraushar for his inspiration, stories, and time!

Entry complied by: Virginia Corvid

Prairie du Chien Museum at Fort Crawford

My voyage to Prairie du Chien began on a gorgeous Saturday morning in early October. The drive from Madison, to Prairie du Chien is quite amazing, glacial bluffs on one side and flat, prairie lands along the other. I met with Mary Elise Antoine, the Vice President of the Prairie du Chien Historical Society. Mary is a librarian, historic researcher, and consultant to museums and private collectors. She provided such amazing details and stories that I am unable to convey the entirety of it here.

Fort Crawford was built on a small island on the Mississippi River in 1816, by the United States military to create a military presence in the area after the War of 1812. Due to flooding the fort was moved to Prairie du Chien in 1829. Prairie du Chien is the oldest town on the Upper Mississippi River, part of the Tri-Cities that also include Marquette and McGregor, Iowa. Because of Prairie du Chien’s location it was a very prosperous place during the French and Indian War and sometime thereafter. The ties between the people of Prairie du Chien with the local Native Americans were very strong; so much so that the United States military built a chain of forts along with Fort Crawford when it was moved from the island onto the mainland. This military move obviously put an end to fur trade as well as the ties of the local towns’ people with the Native Americans, which not long after led to the Black Hawk War in 1832.

The above postcard is a photograph of a painting inscribed: Original Fort Crawford, Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin. This first collection was donated to Prairie du Chien Museum at Fort Crawford by Griff William, a local resident, interested in the acquisition of local historical materials.


The photo postcard above is Fort Crawford before its restoration, begun by the Daughters of the American Revolution during the 1930’s. The postcard is inscribed in white paint, along the bottom of the left hand corner: Fort Crawford, Prairie du Chien – Wis.

The above postcard, also part of the McGregor collection, circa 1910 is a photograph of Steiner’s Construction, early immigrants to Prairie du Chien, their family line has been in the area for over 150 years.

The other collection Mary brought with her to show me comes from a private collector she works with and permission was given to share a few of this mysterious individual’s fantastic collection.

The above postcard is inscribed: Section of New Prairie du Chien, Marquette $1,000,000 suspension bridge, total length 3729 feet, only suspension bridge on the Mississippi River, open for traffic 1932, dedicated June 9-10-11, 1932. I love this image with the parked 1930’s automobiles in the foreground and people standing just behind the cars on the bridge barely visible.

A rooftop level street scene, inscribed: Main Street, Prairie du Chien, Wis. The photographer captures very clearly the road sign for Wisconsin Highway 18 then known as The Great River Road which connects Marquette, Iowa, and Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin.

Last but definitely not least, a spectacular aerial view of Prairie du Chien, Marquette, Iowa and the Mississippi River. This photo postcard is inscribed: Pontoon and Suspension Bridges between Marquette, Iowa & Prairie du Chien, Wis. The steamboat with its stacks blazing captures an important aspect of history within this Tri-City area.

I regret that I cannot share all the amazing postcards with everyone, but if you’re ever in Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin, don’t forget to stop at the Fort Crawford Hospital Museum and all the local historical places around town. Believe me, you’re missing out!

Images Courtesy of Prairie du Chien, Fort Crawford Museum. Special Thanks to Mary Elise Antoine for all her great information and time!

Entry Compiled by: Elizabeth Fox-Corbett

Postcards at the Jewish Museum Milwaukee

A short story for a glimpse into history

A recent visit led us to the Jewish Museum Milwaukee: http://www.jewishmuseummilwaukee.org/, where we were greeted by the museum’s archivist, Jay Hyland. The archives and museum have an important relationship and work very closely with one another. The museum and archives are also an important part of the Milwaukee Jewish Federation. The museum’s archives are a rich resource for people looking to do genealogical research, which is mainly what the records are used for. On this day Jay took some time to show us another interesting part of the archive: the postcard collection. He was knowledgeable about the collection, and also gave some insight into the importance of a story as part of a collection of materials in an archive.

The collection of postcards at the Jewish Museum Milwaukee is small, but varied. There are several different subjects of postcards, and all offer some insight into an aspect of the collection. However, as Jay pointed out, the history of this postcard collection is somewhat of a mystery. It’s unfortunate that we don’t know the back story of the postcards, but they do show us some interesting views of Jewish culture and life around the early parts of the 20th century, and the collection has some really wonderful images!

The postcards above and below show images celebrating the Jewish holiday of Rosh Hashanah, commonly referred to as “Jewish New Year.” An inscription along the top of both cards is a traditional greeting wishing the reader a good year. Because these postcards have such beautiful imagery, they are often used by community members around the time of Rosh Hashanah (this year it was in early September) to create holiday displays.

The postcards above and below highlight a different aspect of this collection: they both show pro-labor images of the early 20th century. The above postcard depicts a ‘behind the scenes’ look at the rich tycoons who depend on laborers; these men and women are depicted as supporting prohibition in order to make their workers “work for 12 cents a day like those in the orient.” In contrast, the working-class people are depicted as trying to “enjoy life as much as possible and study how to better conditions.” The final inscription on the front reads, “Not intoxication but exploitation makes us poor. Capitalists drink and are rich. Oriental workers don’t yet, are poor.” These inscriptions show the complex relationship between several different issues in the early 20th century, including class, industrialism and prohibition.

The postcard above shows a strongly symbolic, pro-labor image of a wedding-cake like structure; at the bottom of the structure, supporting all the other layers, is the working class. Above them are the middle class, soldiers, religious leaders, the aristocracy and, at the pinnacle, a bag of money as big as the people depicted. This postcard illustrates pro-labor ideals in an intriguing and striking allegorical image.

Several of the postcards also provide information about the community member who owned them. The message on the above postcard is written in Russian; however, the printed inscription above is in Russian, French and Polish, indicating along with the handwritten message that the owner of this postcard was probably from Russia or Poland. Several of the postcards in this collection have messages in this same handwriting on the back.

The postcard below again shows the ties of the Milwaukee Jewish community to their Eastern European past. The card’s main inscription, in Russian, states “Hello from Rogacheva.” There is indeed a town in Russia called Rogacheva, which is likely the same town this postcard is depicting. On each of the wings of the butterfly woman pictured at the center is a photo of a building or scene in Rogacheva; clockwise from top left, these images are of Rogacheva’s main street, some sort of institute, the beach front and the theater.

As we saw, even with little explicit story, postcards can offer a rich view into the past and cultural background of the people who owned and used them; indeed, through this collection at the Jewish Museum Milwaukee we got a glimpse into the cultures, languages and politics of the Jewish community in the early 20th century.

Thanks to Jay Hyland for showing us this beautiful collection and sharing a bit about the archives with us!

Images courtesy of the Jewish Museum Milwaukee.

Entry created by Eric Willey and Cassie Warholm-Wohlenhaus.

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.

Curt Teich Archives

If you take Highway 12 east out of Madison, and follow the farm studded fields south, you eventually end up in Wauconda, IL. This is exactly what I did this week, on a particularly snappy fall day during height of southern Wisconsin autumn color. With brittle stalks of sun-reflecting golden corn alternating with the brown stubble of harvested fields; it would have been a pleasant mid-week escape even if I wasn’t heading toward the largest public collection of postcards in the world. However, this collection—situated on the grounds of the Lake County Discovery Museum—is well worth the trek across the border for anyone interested in postcards. In Wauconda, it’s not an exaggeration to say that postcards outnumber people here by thirty to one. That works out to over 350,000 postcards!

As I toured the Archives with Corinne Menominee, collections cataloguer, and Debra Gust, imaging and licensing specialist, I learned this abundance is due to the donation of the Curt Teich Postcard Company. The Curt Teich Company was begun in Chicago in 1898 and produced postcards of scenic places throughout the U.S. and the world. Sold in 1976, the company’s archive of postcards and related material was donated intact to the Lake County Discovery Museum in 1982. The archives maintains copies of most of the postcards the company produced, as well examples of every postcard in album form, and over 100,000 work files for individual postcards. For several years the archives was solely focused on cataloging the thousands of items they received from the company. But now the archives accepts donations of other postcard collections—and field far more offers than they can possibly accept.

Each one of these boxes contains 500 postcards

Examples of all of the Curt Teich Company postcards can be found in one of these albums.

This being a blog about Wisconsin postcards, I couldn’t visit this archive without looking at some examples from the Badger state. This was not difficult to do, as the archives has postcards from 10,000 cities and towns, including over 400 Wisconsin communities. I had the opportunity to look at several examples of postcards of Wisconsin cities from throughout the 20^th century and was struck by the variety of styles and views. The postcards I saw of Madison and Milwaukee were incredibly comprehensive in their locales and angles. Most of these postcards were artistic renderings of photographs, using the bright, punchy colors the company was known for in later decades. One can trace the aesthetic evolution of the company by noting the change from muted, muddy colors in the 1910’s to brighter, sharper colors in the 1930’ and 40’s and beyond.

These souvenir booklets contain a variety of miniature views.

These work files are invaluable to researchers because they document the process of creating each postcard, sometimes revealing the images are not always what they appear to be. For example, Corinne showed me a postcard of Bayfield WI. It was a simple view of a country road with an approaching automobile. But the corresponding work file reveals that the photograph used in the postcard is labeled New York, not Bayfield, WI. Corinne also mentioned the artist’s habit of adding small touches to postcard art to create a more pleasing scene (for example, adding a trolley car to an otherwise empty street or removing buildings for a less cluttered look.)

The real photograph labeled “General. New York” next to the finished postcard, labeled “Greetings from Bayfield, WI.”

Items from the Bayfield postcard work file.

The archives hosts a large number of researchers seeking Curt Teich images for anything from magnets to company calendars, scholarly research and even a few movies. An example of recent scholarly research was a study of imagery of the Grand Canyon, but my mind wheeled with a dozen other possibilities of research that could be done with this collection and the other smaller collections in the archives. Thank you to Debra Gust and Corinne Menominee for showing this fascinating collection and sharing its history with me!

Learn more about the Curt Teich Archives at: http://www.lcfpd.org/teich_archives/?rdct=teicharchives.org

Images courtesy of the Curt Teich Postcard Archives and fotosearch.com

Entry compiled by Kaitlin Dunn

Wisconsin Veterans Museum

The Wisconsin Veterans Museum Research Center research room is oddly welcoming for a state building with the banal name “Thirty on the Square”. Tasked with collecting primary and secondary materials documenting the wars and lives of Wisconsin veterans, it is unique even to similar archives which typically collect materials for particular branches of the armed forces, particular wars, or even particular units. This latitude allows them to cast a larger net but also means they must actively capture the latest aspects of veterans’ lives as wars, times, and technologies change. Reference and Outreach Archivist Russell Horton is preparing a display of postcards from the early 20^th Century which will illustrate their supplemental role in, rather than as, informative communication with their relatives back home and show the richness of their travels as they trained and fought.

Housed with other photographs, some dating to the Civil War, are scores of postcards protected by thin plastic enclosures to retard the decades of deterioration. The writing, whether pen or pencil, is often faded into a nearly illegible scrawl but the vast majority contain no annotation whatsoever; the World War I postcards are typically reproductions of photographs showing little more than a man in uniform with a single annotation, usually (but not always) where correspondence is written: “Dad” is the most common but these are usually personal names with implicit family comprehension. Horton speculates that these postcards served as photographs to commemorate time and place and accompanied letters or other notes. A handful are addressed and stamped with no additional information.

The mass produced postcards are similarly bereft of personal touches but primarily display the environmental circumstances of the soldiers. Marked with the names of French printing companies these postcards capture the rubble of broken cities like Verdun and the corpses of slain airplane pilots, but also the portentous arrival of the American Expeditionary Forces on parade and echoed in the World War II postcards commemorating the liberation of Paris. These World War II postcards, with captions in French and English, are far more celebratory as the people of Paris shrug off the despotism of the Nazis and welcome the arrival of American forces.

Four cards stuck out to me in particular: The first was a World War I era plain paper with a sewn face depicting a purple flower and the words “Forget me not.”

A second and far simpler government issued postcard informed the recipient that their soldier had successfully arrived in France as a part of the American Expeditionary Forces but was an oddly comforting courtesy from the Army.

The third and fourth were more extensive, however. A series of ten postcards documenting the landscape of one 1941 soldier’s training camp outside San Diego was the most annotated of them all. His descriptions of the photographs fall off the edges and fill every square inch of white space and thus there is no room for an address or stamp. They were likely sent with a letter or a small packet. The fourth set of postcards was of the type that Horton is placing in his exhibit; an object stating to be a “Souvenir Folder” and emboldened with Lady Liberty, the unstamped and unaddressed envelope is actually a string of ten postcards depicting the American cargo vessel USS Wilhelmina. According to the online Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships, she was built in 1909 by Matson Navigation Co. and impressed into the US Navy during the Great War. She was returned in 1919 and sold to British interests in 1940 only to be sunk by U-boat in 1940.

In an age when Wisconsin was more rural and its residents likely to born, live, and die in the same county, these postcards illustrated their circumstances more than their thoughts. I cannot speak for succeeding generations of veterans but I suspect that sophisticated mass communication, cheaper photographic reproduction, and colored illustrations and photos reduced the need to implant photographs onto postcards or color-in scenic images of exotic locales. With telephones and later e-mail to inform family of the soldier’s circumstances, postcards fell back on commemorating a location or event. Annotations are more extensive today but circumstantial; The Eiffel Tower postcard may describe the poor body odor of the locals, a Vienna one expressing joy over the size of the pretzels available in the Christmas Market, or any number of snippets perhaps unworthy to be sent in a letter, e-mail, or phone call. Personally I am a fan of this bygone era when pictures spoke for themselves and were far more telling.

Images courtesy of the Wisconsin Veterans Museum.

Entry compiled by: Alex Champion