An Open Heart Vintage Valentime

Our ancestors were crafty people, too. Long before email and widespread telephone use, the cheapest way to reach friends and family was the penny postcard. Unrestricted by modern sorting machinery, early cards might arrive with glued-on glitter, yarn, lace, google eyes, anything imaginable.  My little collection includes Portsmouth postcards made of leather and wood from the dawn of the 20th century. All could be mailed for a single cent. 

This hand-assembled postcard was a gift from a Portsmouth Herald reader. Posted from Kittery in 1907, this sturdy card includes tiny photo views of Market Square and the public library, now Portsmouth Historical Society. The top image is a fuzzy view of the USS Constitution taken from Portsmouth. Curiously, the frigate “Old Ironsides” had been moved from Portsmouth Harbor and back to Boston ten years before his card came out. 

The crafty part here is a red paper heart on the left. It reads–“Heart of Portsmouth, NH.”  Affixed with a metal brad, the heart swings open to reveal more tiny images. There are 14 of them folded accordion-style and scarcely an inch wide. The pictures offer a snapshot of what our forebears believed was important about the city more than a century ago. Five of the cards relate to the Treaty of Portsmouth that ended the Russo-Japanese War here in 1905. 

It is significant, I believe, that only two of the structures depicted are gone–the Rockingham County Courthouse and Christ Church. All the rest remain still standing in the historic downtown. They include the Warner House, the old high school (now apartments), the 1664 Jackson House, the Soldiers and Sailors Monument, Gov. John Langdon House, and the Rockingham Hotel (now condos.) 

For the record, Portsmouth was not the only attractive city featured among a series of copyrighted cards produced by the Glazier Art Co. of Boston. A little onlines sleuthing shows nearly identical postcards from Nashua, NH and from Massachusetts’ locations like Amebsury, Nantucket, Chatham, Cape Ann, Plymouth, Boston. Company workers also assembled “Heart of” penny postcards for Utica, NY, Bardstown, KY, and Millersville and Tunkhannock, PA. They were distributed by the Samuel Ward Company that also specialized in hotel guest books, diaries, scrapbooks, and the ever popular “five year line-a-day book.”

Copyright 2020 by J. Dennis Robinson