My Vintage Postcard Project
This blog was created by P.J. Gardner to share the results of my “Vintage Postcard Project”, a project to take modern photographs that match vintage postcards I inherited from my Great Aunt, Esther Perry Gardner.
Here’s just one example, this one from the Columbia River Gorge in Oregon:
Great Aunt Esther
Aunt Esther was an unmarried school teacher and spent her summers adventurously traveling all over America by car, collecting postcards wherever she went.
The collection I inherited includes over 375 postcards from all over the United States—especially the West Coast, West, and South.
The majority seem to have been gathered between the late 1930s and the early 1940s, just prior to the American entry into World War II.
None of the postcards were published with copyright dates, and Aunt Esther’s postcards were never mailed, so I have few clues about the exact dates of her travels.
I was excited when I recently discovered a photograph of Aunt Esther’s father and stepmother, William Elliott Gardner and Emily Hogarth Covert, with an annotation on the back that says, “After our return from 10,000 mile Western trip by automobile. Nine weeks.”
Although some trips most certainly took place in other years— especially those to the American South— the postcards from this Western trip are bracketed by the 1939 New York World’s Fair on the East Coast, and the 1939 Golden Gate International Exhibition on San Francisco Bay on the West Coast, both happening during the summer that year.
My Own Cross-Country Driving Trip
In August and September 2012, I traveled with my friend Arjan Post on our own cross-country driving tour. Before we left, I identified about 185 of Aunt Esther’s postcards related to places we might visit on this particular trip: Idaho to Washington state, down the length of the West Coast, our National parks and other sites in Arizona, Colorado, and Wyoming, and South Dakota on our way home.
During our trip, I tried to retrace Aunt Esther’s steps and photograph as many of the same spots today as I could. There are about 7000 reasons why you can’t match postcards exactly, but it is such a thrill when you navigate to the same place and see what has happened to it. It is an amazingly fascinating process to locate the right spot and struggle for a similar vantage point, despite all the photographic challenges of lighting and weather and intervening obstacles. In the end, you have broadened your world view and learned a lot about our country and its history and the passage of time.
Most of the National Parks have successfully preserved our heritage, as they were intended to do, so many places look no different today than they did over 70 years ago. Other places— especially of man-made buildings and locations— have been altered dramatically or no longer exist.
At the beginning of the trip, on August 2, we stopped in Interlaken, New York, to visit the Lake View Cemetery where my Aunt Esther is buried with her family. It seemed an appropriate place to start.
[Modern Photographs: © 2012 P.J. Gardner. All Rights Reserved.]