Giant Maine Potato

This isn't a generic exaggeration card that could be anywhere USA. The giant spud is sitting on a classic northern Maine Bangor and Aroostook Railway car. The Bangor and Aroostook Railway (BAR) did in fact haul potatoes (in heated boxcars, no less) and at one time owed half of their annual revenue to transporting the tasty tuber.

The card was sent to Henry Fray in Seattle in 1910 from J.M.W. in Limestone, Maine. The message is a little hard to read, but here's what I could get from it (Note: Bsh indicates bushels). I love that it's a card sent by a Maine  potato farmer:

Dear Fray we are all done digging spuds raised 5300. Bsh like the chap on the other side here at the home farm and 4000. Bsh on the farm that Ben is on. I am still making starch will probably be at it three weeks more. Wish I could come and make you a visit there. All well. J.M.W.

Even though the initials J.M.W. would not appear to provide a lot of information, Limestone is a pretty small place and there were only so many potato farmers. I believe that this card was written by J.M. Ward.  In a 1916 publication on agricultural economics, J.M. Ward details the equipment needed for his potato farm.
 


Here's a great photo from Wikipedia, showing a potato caretaker's card. Because potatoes were so important, men were hired to take care of them on the trains and make sure the proper temperature was maintained in the cars. The pass allowed the 'potato caretakers'  free train travel back home.

What is it about those Mainers?

I've just been reading through an amusing little book of Maine postcards from 1900-1920. The book was compiled by Deborah H. Gould and is entitled: Father is Here...He's as Fat as a Pig. Believe it or not, the title comes from a message on the back of one of the cards.

 
Some of the fronts of the postcards are featured in the book too, but the real focus is on the messages.  The book is tiny, barely larger than a postcard itself, but it is full of great messages:

Monday Morning I am feeling fine expect to get a new leg today.

Everything went fine, except the fire...

Do you remember the fat man we saw out here Aug 2

Sister I did not go to the fair after all. Jimmy brought home some real bananas kinder think he'll die before morning.

I have looked at a lot of postcards and I also tend to focus on the message side, but I have never seen so many unusual, cryptic, and hilarious messages on postcards. I wondered how Deborah was able to find these. She must have spent years going through boxes in antique stores and flea markets.

I also wondered if the unusual nature of the messages had something to do with the fact that they are all from Maine.  I have a number of Maine postcards. Here are a few.

Very few of my Maine postcards have any message at all on the back, including the ones that were sent. None of these do, not even the last one, sent in 1925 to Miss Elizabeth Hall on Great Diamond Isle in Portland, Maine. No message, not even a signature. I know that Mainers have a reputation for saying very little, so I assumed that this might account for the lack of messages.

Maybe the cards with the great messages never make it out of the state. I don't know. I noticed something else about the messages in the book though. Fat is mentioned in a number of the messages, something I found very unusual. I have also never seen haint written on a card, as in Dear Sister I haint heard from you for some time... I think it was a good idea to limit the cards in the book to Maine cards, because you get a sense of the place as well as the era.

If you want to take a closer look at the book or order one for yourself, you can find it here on Amazon.com.

Frog in Your Throat

Frog in Your Throat was a popular brand of throat lozenges at the turn of the century.  They printed a number of cards like this one around 1905 that generally featured a lovely lady in the foreground and a leering frog in the background. The lozenges contained licorice, coltsfoot, wild cherry bark, horehound, cubeb, capsicum, menthol, potassium bitartrate, peppermint, sugar, and other aromatics. Here's a link to a website that shows a nice collection of Frog in Your Throat ephemera.

The back of the card is nice too. It's labeled as a Private Mailing Card instead of a postcard. Prior to the congressional act in 1898, the US Government had a monopoly on printing postcards. After 1898, private mailing cards were allowed, but until 1907 only the address and no message was allowed on the back of the card. That means that a lot of these cards are mysterious; unless the sender wrote on the picture side, there's little indication of who sent it.

While we don't know who sent the card, we do know that it was sent to Miss Prudence Davis of Portland, Maine. A short search revealed that Prudence Augusta Davis (of the same address) studied at Smith College and married Melville H. Marston on Thursday, November 6, 1913.

Happy Birthday, Longfellow - Portland, Maine

What is wrong with me? I keep procrastinating and don't get the news of these special deals to you in time. Darn, this one was half-off admission too! Maybe if you're really nice they'll give you the discount anyway? Oops, maybe not; the house isn't there anymore. What you will find in its place is a Marriott Residence Inn. Don't blame Marriott though; before they built the hotel it was a parking lot.

Longfellow was born here on February 27, 1807. Later, his family moved to another house nearby (the Wadsworth-Longfellow House), which you can still visit.  You can also visit the Longfellow National Historic Site in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

In 1914, Longfellow's birthplace was dedicated as a permanent memorial. The International Longfellow Society, with Woodrow Wilson as its honorary president, took charge of the house and solicited donations to cover the $20,000 needed to pay the first and second mortgages and pay off outstanding bills for restoration work. An article in the New York Times on February 27, 1916 discussed the importance of the house and urged people to make donations to maintain it. Supporters sent donations from all over Europe and from as far away as Japan.

The effort was successful and the house operated as a museum for several decades before it fell into disrepair. In the early 1950s, a man from Alaska mounted an aggressive fund-raising campaign for the museum through The International Longfellow Society. Unfortunately, it seems that he was using the collected money for personal use instead. To make matters worse, his fund-raising efforts were in direct competition with the legitimate efforts of the other Longfellow House.

After the house was demolished in 1955, the lot remained vacant for a long time. In the 1990s workers preparing the site for reconstruction unearthed the plaque for the stone marker that had been erected at the site in 1956. The plaque had been missing for several years and presumed stolen. Instead, it was just buried in the dirt. I came upon this photo taken by photojournalist, John Alphonse, on his website Reality Times. He took the picture shortly after the plaque was unearthed and set back in its stone marker. John graciously allowed me to use the photo for this post.

To celebrate Longfellow's birthday today, here is one of his poems:

The Arrow and the Song

I shot an arrow into the air,

It fell to earth, I knew not where;
For, so swiftly it flew, the sight
Could not follow it in its flight.

I breathed a song into the air,
It fell to earth, I knew not where;
For who has sight so keen and strong,
That it can follow the flight of song?

Long, long afterward, in an oak
I found the arrow, still unbroke;
And the song, from beginning to end,
I found again in the heart of a friend.