Image: Color postcard showing the pavilion and roller coaster on the north end of Goguac Lake, c. 1910 Caption on front: Club House and Roller Coaster, Lake Goguac.
Postcards emerged in the mid-19th century as an inexpensive way to send a short message — think of them as the Instagram or Facebook of their day.
And just as social media revolutionized the way people communicated, the humble postcard became an engine of our modernist culture, and people loved them. Historians estimate that that some 200 billion postcards circulated in the first two decades of the 20th century.
The telephone would soon extinguish the “Postcard Craze,” but nostalgia for the medium endures. Postcard collecting, known as “deltiology” remains among the world’s largest collecting hobbies.
Thanks to donations from local collectors, most notably the late Stuart Lassen, Willard Library today has more than 5,000 postcards in its digital archive. Browsing the images, you see the city age from its infancy as a mill town through its halcyon days as the Queen City and the birthplace of the cereal industry.
This month, you can see the cards up-close in our “Things Worth Remembering” exhibit downtown.
