Have you ever sent a postcard? Maybe you were on vacation and wanted to tell a friend all about your adventures. Or maybe you saved the postcard for yourself, as a way to remember the journey. Postcards serve many purposes, even when they make their way into the archives.
Some postcards allow us to document the way that certain places looked at a time, either as drawn by an artist, or sometimes as photographed by a witness to that past moment. Other postcards allow us to document correspondence and human relationships, by looking closely at the message penned on the back. Some postcards document a political movement or even advertise a product.
Some postcards can provide both a significant image and a significant handwritten message. While they may be small, postcards give us a unique window into the past.
Recently, I’ve been working with a lot of postcards in the Archives & Library. I’ve come across two particular stories that I enjoyed, and I thought they would be worth sharing. To learn exactly what I found, keep reading below.
The postcards I’ve been working with come from a variety of sources, many of which are unidentified. So imagine my surprise when I turned over this postcard to find a mailing address for Nimrod B. Allen, former Columbus resident, and founder of a national organization known as Frontiers of America.
Allen was recently featured in an exhibit at the Ohio History Center titled Poindexter Village: A Portrait in Stories, because of his importance to the African American community in the city of Columbus. A large collection of his papers is held at the Archives & Library.
Here’s what the exhibit had to say about Mr. Allen: Nimrod Booker Allen was an instrumental force in the creation of many prominent organizations on the Near East Side. He was born in Alabama, coming to Ohio in the early 1900s to attend Wilberforce University. Allen then traveled to Columbus in 1915, where he served as the Executive Secretary of the Spring Street YMCA and was central to the founding of the Columbus Urban League and the Big Walnut Country Club. Allen also formed the Frontiers International, now a national black service organization.
However, it was actually another name on the back of the postcard that served as my greatest source of excitement. While the postcard was addressed to Allen, it was signed from “The Methods.” I am almost certain that this signature comes from a contemporary of Nimrod Allen who also became an integral figure to Columbus’s Near East Side- Dr. William Arthur Method.
Another interesting story that I found amongst the postcards was a little bit harder to spot. I began to see many postcards addressed to different members of the Bareis family of Canal Winchester, Ohio, all coming from a woman named Grace, who appeared to be traveling across Europe. On the off chance that I might find something, I typed “Grace Bareis, Canal Winchester” into the Google search bar.
It appears that Grace Bareis made her journey across Europe in the summer of 1916. While traveling, she sent messages to her parents and her cousins, detailing her journey. Bareis also sent home blank postcards for her parents to set aside for her, as memories of the places she had seen while abroad. Bareis often wrote directly onto the front image of a postcard to make notes to her family about her journeys.
While visiting Saint-Étienne-du-Mont, a church in Paris, France, Bareis made multiple notes on her postcards about the tomb of Blaise Pascal, a well-known mathematician of the 17th century. This note bears much greater importance now that I know about Grace Bareis’s own contributions to the mathematical community.
Interested in learning more about postcards? The Ohio History Connection’s collections include many wonderful postcards documenting both the people and places that make up our state’s history. Visit the Archives & Library at the Ohio History Center to check out some postcards that interest you, or get started using the large number of digitized postcards on Ohio Memory. You never know what you might find!
