Dating Tea Room Postcards

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[[File:Hotel-Jefferson-Tea-Room-Saint-Louis-MO-Postcard-Back.jpg|right|thumb|300px|Divided Back Era: Hotel Jefferson Tea Room Saint Louis, Missouri, postcard back, postally used in 1914.]]
[[File:Hotel-Jefferson-Tea-Room-Saint-Louis-MO-Postcard-Back.jpg|right|thumb|300px|Divided Back Era: Hotel Jefferson Tea Room Saint Louis, Missouri, postcard back, postally used in 1914.]]
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[[File:Will-O-The-Wisp-Tea-Room-Sheridan-Square-New-York-RPPC-Postcard-Front.jpg|right|thumb|300px|Real Phtoto Poscard , RPPC: Will O The Wisp Tea Room, Sheridan Square New York RPPC postcard front.jpg]]
[[File:M-and-O-Tea-Room-Wishing-Well-Gatlinburg-TN-Blanche-Moffett-1949-Postcard-Front.jpg|right|thumb|300px|Linen Era: M and O Tea Room and Wishing Well, Gatlinburg, Tennessee, Blanche Moffett, proprietor, postcard front, postmarked 1949.]]
[[File:M-and-O-Tea-Room-Wishing-Well-Gatlinburg-TN-Blanche-Moffett-1949-Postcard-Front.jpg|right|thumb|300px|Linen Era: M and O Tea Room and Wishing Well, Gatlinburg, Tennessee, Blanche Moffett, proprietor, postcard front, postmarked 1949.]]

Revision as of 01:25, 14 September 2020

Divided Back Era: Hotel Jefferson Tea Room Saint Louis, Missouri, postcard back, postally used in 1914.
Real Phtoto Poscard , RPPC: Will O The Wisp Tea Room, Sheridan Square New York RPPC postcard front.jpg
Linen Era: M and O Tea Room and Wishing Well, Gatlinburg, Tennessee, Blanche Moffett, proprietor, postcard front, postmarked 1949.

On this site you will find many, 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 them are photographic prints, but most take the form of postcards.

Dating postcards can be a little tricky. There are four basic ways to date a card, and before i turn you loose with the list of the tea room images archived here, i would like to introduce you to some postcard dating techniques:.

Contents

Dating Postcards by Era of Manufacture

  • Pioneer Era (1893-1898): These are the earliest known postcards. They do not contain images.
  • Private Mailing Card Era (1898-1901): The phrase "Private Mailing Card" was required to be printed on any card that was not produced by the United States Post Office.
  • Undivided Back Era (1901-1907): These cards have the word Post Card on the back, but only the address was allowed on the back, hence any message had to be written in the image area or outside, in the border area.
  • Real Photo Postcards or RPPC (1900 to present day): These are direct photographic prints made in a darkroom on a fairly heavy grade of photo paper. The back often will be marked with the brand-name of the paper. Most Real Photo cards are black-and-white, according to the availability of film in the early 20th century, although a colour photo could be developed on the same kind of heavy paper. Like any photograph, RPPCs are subject to fading in the sun and paper curl due to humidity or lack thereof. They should be digitized and stored flat, away from light. Because they are hand-made in a darkroom, RPPCs were ideal for sales to small businesses that could afford to pay for thousands of cards. During the height of the RPPC era, from 1900 to about 1940, local or wandering photographers would take business exterior and interior views "on spec" and try to sell the proprietor on buying a hundred or so cards. Very often on an RPPC, the name of the locations was written in the negative and appears as white lettering on the print. Because they continued to be made in small batches for so long, and could be reprinted at will, the fact that a tea room postcard is an RPPC does not provide a solid clue to the actual date of the photograph.
  • Divided Back Era (1907-1915): With the postcard craze in full swing, and collectors wanting un-defaced images, the USPO relented and allowed messages to be written on the left-hand side of the postcard back, as long as the address was written on the right-hand side. Some postcard fans ignored this rule and wrote straight across the back, and then put the card into an envelope to mail, in order to preserve it from cancellation mark smudges on the front side, which would ruin the image. Many view cards of this era were black and white photos that had been half-toned and overlaid with pastel colours of ink to give them the look of colour photography. The use of a loupe will help you distinguis an RPPC from a half-tone print.
  • Chromolitho Era (1905-1918): Chromolithography is a lamentedly lost technique for producing colour prints using fine-grained stones upon which the artist draws in grease pencil to create resists for colour ink lay. A good chromolitho or chromo, as they were called, might be comprised of as many as twelve colours of ink, in the form of tiny grains or dots, to craft the illusion of continuous tone blending. Rarely employed for view cards, chromolithography was used by artists to create topical cards. Topics included season's greetings, birthday wishes, and series of 6 or 12 cards on subject matter such as patriotism, cute animals, good luck, divination, and the like. For chromolitho cards about tea leaf reading, see the page on Fortune Telling Postcards by Fred C. Lounsbury
  • White Border Era (1915-1930): With colour printing of black-and-white photos becoming more common, a particular grade of smooth white index stock was selected, and most companies employed a white border around the edges of the image, for ease of trimming and to keep the presses cleaner. In other words, RPPCs and over-printed black-and-white or tinted images that had previously run as full bleeds, from edge to edge, now had white borders. As previously, these black and white photos were half-toned and overlaid with pastel colours of ink to give them the look of colour photography.
  • Linen Era (1930-1945): In 1930 a different kind of index stock was introduced, called Linen Finish or Linen, embossed with a pattern that resembled woven cloth. These postcards began as black-and-white photos but were artfully hand-retouched until the finished art was a work of radiant, harmonious colour. The outer borders were ivory in tone, to better set off the fabulous colouring jobs.
  • Photo-Chrome Era (1939 to present day): Chrome-Coat or Chrome index stock paper is used for printing colour photographs without artful retouching. The mid-century modern colours are often garish. 'Nuff said.

Dating Postcards by Copyright, Postal Code, Publisher, or Series Number

Postcard collectors long ago began indexing and dating cards by the presence of copyright dates, postal codes on addresses, publisher names and addresses, or series numbers. I could go into a lot of detail about such arcane matters, but on the presumption that you are here for the tea rooms, not for postcard collecting minutiae, i will just say that i have specialized in roadside and main street linens from Curt Teich since the 1960s, my mother built her own postcard site back in the 1990s which i have kept online since her death in 2005 (you can find it at Liselotte Erlanger Glozer's Postcards), and only good sense and courtesy prevent me from noting which RPPC tea room cards have AZO stamp boxes and which are DEFENDER or AGFA, and whether or not they have stars, triangles, or diamonds in the corners or above and below ... because all of that dating code data is available online already, and you are here for the tea rooms, right?

Dating View Cards by Automobile Models and Signage

For those who know their car makes and models, dating exterior views of tea rooms and other small businesses is a cinch. I know enough to get the decade right; beyond that, i shall say no more. However, when it comes to signage, i am a demon, and i can often date an image by word-usage, logo-types, or techniques of sign-painting. Of course, as with autos, signs will only tell you the earliest date the image could have been photographed. Always remember that an old car or an old sign can be photographed years after having been created.

Dating Postcards by Back-of-Card Postmarks, Fontography, and Handwriting

The text on the back of a card — if it has any — will certainly provide a clue as to the decade, if not the year, of manufacture. Sho-card lettering, hand-inked deigns, and eccentric type mark the early era, after which we see regular serif type, followed by a mix of serif and sans-serif, and, finally, the domination of sans-serif. As for handwriting, that too changed over the decades, as methods of cursive writing were modified in the school systems. Of course, dating a person's handwriting by decade will only provide a clue as to when the writer was born, not when the card was written and mailed -- but although a "Grandma" signature in 1890s cursive will look different than a "Grandma" in 1940s cursive, postmarks can only give us a "date mailed," which is not the same as "date photographed." Despite this, a 1915 postmark on an otherwise undateable card at least gives us a clue as to the probable decade of manufacture. However, speaking as a postcard fanatic, i can tell you that back in the day when very few people were collecting linens and i could buy them for a nickel or a dime apiece, i sent hundreds, if not thousands, of them through the mail to my hippie friends. So if you find a linen on eBay with a note signed "cat" that was postmarked between 1964 and 1984, that was me, and i messed up your postmark dating system for you. Sorry 'bout that!

Dating Postcards by Census, City Directory, Newspaper, and Magazine Research

When dating portraits of named people, researchers rely heavily on census reports, birth ad death indexes, and other tools of the genealogist or biographer. When dating a view card, there are a few handy ways to approach the problem. First, if a street address is given, go to a current street view and see if the building is still standing. If not, go to the local historical society and ask for information on when the building was demolished, as that will become your latest possible date. Next, using online city directories and advertisements in newspapers and magazines, search for the tea room name and city name. Log every advertisement you can find to establish an approximate start-stop era. If the name of the proprietor is given, perform a genealogy and census search on the name, to establish a birth-death timeline. These approximations, especially when coupled with automobile models, women's fashions, and postcard era of manufacture, will allow you to get very close to a date for your card's image. Of course, some searches will fail, but if you enjoy research, you will be surprised to learn how much is known -- or available for a researcher to learn -- about people who lived and did business more than 100 years ago.

catherine yronwode
curator, historian, and docent
The Mystic Tea Room

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