Vintage Tea Room Postcards
From Mystic Tea Room
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Tea Room Postcard Gallery Index
Our Tea Room Postcard Gallery allows you to browse for vintage tea rooms alphabetically, first by State or Nation, then by tea room name. Any nation outside the USA is listed by a nation-name instead of a state-name. If a given nation accumulates more than 16 tea room postcards, i will break the nation into provinces, counties, or districts and move the images into those named pages.
Tea Rooms of the United States
Most of these images come from my own vintage tea room postcard collection, but some have been donated by fellow-collectors or come from online sources.
- Alabama Tea Rooms
- Alaska Tea Rooms
- Arizona Tea Rooms
- Arkansas Tea Rooms
- California Tea Rooms
- Colorado Tea Rooms
- Connecticut Tea Rooms
- Delaware Tea Rooms
- Florida Tea Rooms
- Georgia Tea Rooms
- Hawaii Tea Rooms
- Idaho Tea Rooms
- Illinois Tea Rooms
- Indiana Tea Rooms
- Iowa Tea Rooms
- Kansas Tea Rooms
- Kentucky Tea Rooms
- Louisiana Tea Rooms
- Maine Tea Rooms
- Maryland Tea Rooms
- Massachusetts Tea Rooms
- Michigan Tea Rooms
- Minnesota Tea Rooms
- Mississippi Tea Rooms
- Missouri Tea Rooms
- Montana Tea Rooms
- Nebraska Tea Rooms
- Nevada Tea Rooms
- New Hampshire Tea Rooms
- New Jersey Tea Rooms
- New Mexico Tea Rooms
- New York Tea Rooms
- North Carolina Tea Rooms
- North Dakota Tea Rooms
- Ohio Tea Rooms
- Oklahoma Tea Rooms
- Oregon Tea Rooms
- Pennsylvania Tea Rooms
- Rhode Island Tea Rooms
- South Carolina Tea Rooms
- South Dakota Tea Rooms
- Tennessee Tea Rooms
- Texas Tea Rooms
- Utah Tea Rooms
- Vermont Tea Rooms
- Virginia Tea Rooms
- Washington Tea Rooms
- West Virginia Tea Rooms
- Wisconsin Tea Rooms
- Wyoming Tea Rooms
Tea Rooms of the British Commonwealth
Tea leaf reading, as well as the custom of taking afternoon tea, developed in the British Commonwealth. Inhabitants of Anglophone nations are the primary users of fortune-telling tea cups and the primary frequenters of tea rooms.
- Australia Tea Rooms
- Canada Tea Rooms
- England Tea Rooms
- Ireland Tea Rooms
- New Zealand Tea Rooms
- Scotland Tea Rooms
- Wales Tea Rooms
Tea Rooms of Europe
Most European tea room postcards depict pre-World-War-One establishments, created for the convenience of British and American tourists. This is obvious in the fact that the term "Tea Room" often appears on signage, rather than an indigenous term like "Tee Stube")
Tea Room Postcard History
For more information, see Tea Room History
The beginning of the tea room movement happened to coincide with the postcard craze, which was in full flower from 1905 until World War One. (If you are unfamiliar with the tea room movement, you can learn more about it in the page on Tea Room History.) Even after the postcard craze waned a bit during the 1920s, many tea rooms kept on printing postcards, as they had learned that illustrated mailing cards were an inexpensive way to boost their business. Postcard stamps only cost one cent back then, so in some some tea rooms, when you sat down to order, a pre-stamped postcard showing the room in which you were seated accompanied the menu, and you were encouraged to write a message and mail it to a friend. Thus, today's postcard collectors find many tea room cards with messages on the back that read something like this:
Hello, Edith —
We found this wonderful
little place on the way
to the Falls — Maybe
you can come along next
time and we'll stop here
to eat. The view is lovely
and the food is great.
— Mabel
Dating Tea Room Postcards
For more information, see Dating Tea Room Postcards
On this site you will find many interior and exterior views of quaint, old-fashioned tea rooms, as well as the backs of cards, some with messages and some simply indicating the name of the printer or additional information about the tea room. A few of the images are photographic prints or contemporary online photos, but most take the form of postcards.
Postcards that depict a place are also known as view cards. Those that are about a topic, such as cute kittens or railroads are called topicals. Topicals can be view cards, and vice versa. A classic example of a view card that is also a topical is a postcard of a train station. It shows a view of the station, and might be collected by someone who collects view cards of specific towns, counties, states, or nations -- or it may be collected as part of the topic of railroading. Tea room postcards are mostly considered to be view cards, but some of them may overlap with popular collection topics such as clothing fashions, houseplants, food service, or street signage.
Dating postcards can be a little tricky, but here are five basic ways that collectors can date a card:
- By Era of Manufacture
- By Copyright, Postal Code, Publisher, or Series Number
- By Automobile Models, Clothing Fashions, and Signage
- By Back-of-Card Postmarks, Fontography, and Handwriting
- By Census, City Directory, Newspaper, and Magazine Research
To learn about how these techniques are combined to date a postcard's publication ir was made or a photograph was taken, please visit our detailed page on Dating Tea Room Postcards.
We Welcome Contributions
If you have a photo or scan of a vintage or contemporary tea room you want to share here, we welcome contributions!
We seek interior scenes of tea room furnishings and decor and exterior tea room views with signage; we like to have the postcard backs as well as the fronts, but recognize that this is not always possible. Contemporary close-ups of plated food on a table will not be archived.
Horizontal images must be a minimum of 600 pixels wide after trimming away backgrounds and should include the name, city, and state of the establishment, plus any other information you may have.
Please post your image donations in the "Tea Room Image Donations" thread in my husband nagasiva's Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/nagasiva/permalink/3341234822627379/
Thank you!
catherine yronwode
curator, historian, and docent
The Mystic Tea Room
