History Knox
Mark Sebastian Jordan authors a History Knox column each Saturday reflecting on the history of the community.
FREDERICKTOWN — A bit of a mystery to begin the new year. I search many places for images and stories for this column of Knox County history.
One area that has often proved fruitful is vintage postcards, which were once a highly popular way of contacting friends through the mail.
Since one side of the card was intended for a short, written message — the ‘texting’ of 1910 — the flip side of the card could be taken up with a picture.
Images were sometimes humorous illustrations or photographs, and famous people and places were popular as well. But one mainstay was local images.
If you wanted to send a picture of your neighborhood to a friend, postcards were an inexpensive way to do so.
Thus, all sorts of variations of local images were used, and photographers would go in exploration of scenic spots.
It appears that such was the case for this image, though I’m wracking my brain to figure out where it was.
The original picture, which depicted an automobile on a road going through some rather steep hills, was first turned into lithographic artwork, and then tinted by hand to provide color for a linen postcard.
The automobile, rather sloppily tinted blue on the postcard, looks to me like a vehicle of the 1930s or 40s. The card is identified as “Fredericktown, Ohio,” but I was unable to think of any spot near Fredericktown that had hills of this steepness.
That’s when I dimly remembered the other Fredericktown.
In my previous researches, I had turned up references to a tiny, unincorporated community in Columbiana County, Ohio, which was also named Fredericktown.
Columbiana County is in extreme eastern Ohio, with that Fredericktown being found between Beaver Creek State Park and the Pennsylvania border.
But if they ever tried to incorporate that hamlet, the U.S. Post Office probably denied their request, on the grounds of the long-standing Knox County village by that name, which has had its own post office since 1828. Perhaps that is why the local post office for the part of Columbiana County where their Fredericktown stands is today officially known as Calcutta.
That name wasn’t taken, at least not in Ohio.
When looking at the landscape of Columbiana County on Google Maps, I’d say it seems a solid fit for the kind of steep Appalachian hills seen in the postcard, unless anyone knows of a local spot that actually matches this view.
While we certainly have some hills of that height, I don’t know that any are that steep near Fredericktown.
Let us know if it looks familiar.