It’s easy to forget how hard it was to casually communicate in the past. With social media and instant electronic communication at our fingertips, we are living in a different world.
A little more than 100 years ago, modern communications were only just starting to spread out into rural America, via telegraph and telephone. Yet even then, folks were excited about a form of communication that allowed them to “chat” with friends who lived some distance away.
Of course, there was always the possibility of writing a letter, sealing it, and mailing it. But a cheaper and quicker medium had sprung up over the years: the postcard.
On a postcard, you could write a quick note, slap a penny stamp on it, and mail it away to family or friend. It was quick, cheap, and enormously popular.
On the afternoon of Sept. 4, 1908, Angie Bell of Homer decided to send just such a card.
She may have been related to the Bells who had a farm north of Homer, just over the Knox County line on the west side of what is today Ohio 661. Or she may have been related to (or even identical to) the “Mrs. Bell” listed as the owner of a small parcel east of Homer in the 1875 atlas.
Whatever the case, it sounds like she was at the time of this postcard working at a business in Homer.
Finding business slow, she grabbed a postcard — if she was perhaps working in a store, there would have been plenty on hand — and jotted a note to her friend, Mrs. J. W. Mead, who lived up in Bucyrus, in Crawford County. The note is direct: “Dear Friend, Come the first of next week, business is still dull.”
She then slapped a one cent Benjamin Franklin stamp on the postcard and took it to the post office, where it was stamped “P.M.” The date and location of the post office are the only other things in the postmark.
The pretty street scene on the postcard appears to have been of no particular importance to Mrs. Bell.
It was a shot of East Gambier Street, showing the little island where Division Street crosses. That island is reduced in size today, due to the slight widening of East Gambier Street. This was the intersection where, at the time of this photograph, the photographer would have had his back to the Maplehurst Mansion, site of the infamous murder of Miranda Bricker in 1905 which we have covered extensively in this column.
Whether Angie, several miles south, was aware of that when she picked this card is unknown. Rather, it’s more likely it was just a pleasant scene. Perhaps it was on sale.
The postcard publisher was Frank E. Kirby & Co., of Mount Vernon, but it had been printed in Germany, where printing presses were dedicated to postcards, and produced much of the world’s supply.
Whatever the case, if business remained dull, we hope the friends at least had a chance to get together for fun.
