Luckyday buttons — the talk of the town

Here's the front and back of a 3¼-inch-wide card that once held spare or replacement buttons from a brand called Luckyday.

Some of these buttons were produced in Muscatine, Iowa, which was once the Pearl Button Capital of the World, according to an informative article from the Muscatine History and Industry Center.

If you're interested in reading more about vintage buttons, one good place to start is the Button Floozies blog.

1907 postcard: Nubilous but moonlit sky hangs over riverside town

As I sit here typing, it's 12° F outside and the fierce winds have died down for the moment. Here's an early 20th century postcard featuring a painting of a cloudy summer night, with a full moon shining through the overcast sky and down onto some riverside rooftops.

I can only read the second of the two postmarks on the back of the card. It was stamped on December 9, 1907, in Linden Hall, Pennsylvania. There are two possibilities for what Linden Hall could refer to:

• Linden Hall is a girls' school (founded in 1746) in northern Lancaster County. I suppose it's possible that it once had its own post office.
• There was a Linden Hall in Centre County, Pennsylvania, which thrived until the 1920s. It definitely had a post office around the turn of the century. It is now the Linden Hall Historic District.

I don't have a great guess as to which of those two it might be.

The split-back postcard is addressed to Miss Bertha Tressler of Linden Hall and the short message is: "I beg your pardon for not writing yet but will write soon. E.R.H." Yes, another one of those postcards to indicate that a longer correspondence is on the way.

Another mystery of this postcard is the publisher. This is the tiny logo on the back. It might be H.K. & M. Some sources indicate that it's Hubert Kohler & Co. of Munich, Germany.

Early 1900s Valentine wish: "And p'r'aps my spiders too"

Here's a great vintage Valentine that was posted by the @HarvardArchives Twitter account. It was, according to the tweet, sent to a Harvard professor of zoology in the early 1900s.

See all 10 of Papergreat's Valentine posts, full of vintage coolness.

Two Postcrossing arrivals from Belarus

I seem to get a disproportionate number of Postcrossing cards from Belarus. Which is perfectly cool. It's neat to see how many people in that nation are involved in the international exchange of postcards. The country even has its own official Postcrossing stamp!

I especially liked the two recent cards that I received from Belarus, because they had ties to culture and folklore.

This card came from Anastasija (Nastya) in Brest, a city of 300,000+ in extreme western Belarus.¹ The English subtitle for this postcard illustration is "How a hen saved a rooster." Anastasija writes in her note: "Our country has a rich history and there are a lot of fairy-tales [that] were translated from our language to other languages. This tale is one of the most popular in our culture."

I haven't yet found the specific tale that she and the postcard are referring to. I did, however, find one website that states: "In Belarusian folklore, the rooster is a heroic character, and comes to protect weak people. It crows with a sound like 'Ку-ка-ре-ку.'"

It does look, though, as if the hen (and not the rooster) is the heroic character in this folk tale.

This postcard is from Kate, age 16, in Grodno, which is also in western Belarus, north of Brest.

She writes:

"Postcard depicts Kupala Night. Kupalye — an ancient folk festival associated with the summer solstice. It is celebrated on the night of 6July7.² Kupalye holiday was considered magical. On this day, nature blossoms, mermaids came out of their hiding places, boys and girls ... sang, danced, jumped over the fire, which eliminates the various afflictions and diseases. Girls wove wreaths of flowers. [They] make wishes and [throw] wreaths into the river. Also, people searched [for] paparotuika flower (flower of happiness) at night."³

Wikipedia adds: "Girls may float wreaths of flowers (often lit with candles) on rivers, and would attempt to gain foresight into their relationship fortunes from the flow patterns of the flowers on the river. Men may attempt to capture the wreaths, in the hope of capturing the interest of the woman who floated the wreath."

Footnotes
1. Brest was formerly known as Brest-on-the-Bug (because of the Bug River), which is a seriously cool name.
2. Regarding the date, Wikipedia states that Kupala Night "is celebrated in Ukraine, Belarus and Russia currently on the night of 6/7 July in the Gregorian or New Style calendar, which is 23/24 June in the Julian or Old Style calendar still used by many Orthodox Churches."
3. Other possible spellings I found for the Flower of Happiness include paparats-kvetka and Kvetka paparatsi. I believe it is what we might call the fern flower.

Mystery tiny notepad from the past

Here's the cover of a tiny notepad that we came across while sorting through some stuff at my mom's house.

The notepad measures just 2⅛ inches by 4 inches. There is no indication anywhere of the publisher or manufacturer.

The illustration features a dippy dog who is apparently being lifted into the air by something he caught with his rod and reel (though I hesitate to read too much into the picture). The fact that we can't see everything that's happening makes me think this might have been part of a set of small notepads. Putting them side-by-side might have revealed the full cartoon. But that's just a guess.

A Google "reverse search" for this particular image did not yield any results.

So it might remain a mystery...

Artsy-fartsy photos from a night on the town with real artists

On Friday, I had a nice night on the town with artist-poet Joan and artist Sarah, whose fabulous work was featured and presented at various York venues.

I snapped and filtered some photos with my iPhone, trying to get into the artistic spirit. Here they are, for posterity.

Postcard of building that's been gone for a century (Washington Hotel)

Here's a battle-scarred, never-used postcard, probably from before 1910, of the Washington Hotel in Monterey, California. The postcard was part of The PCK Series, from Paul C. Koeber Co.¹

One-third of the back of the postcard has been designated for:

In space below May be written senders nam and addres.
(No others writting).
So it's not truly a split-back postcard, as no message can be included.

The Washington Hotel was, as you might imagine, old even before this postcard image was taken (sometime in the first decade of the 20th century). According to administrator Claire Martin on CAGenWeb Monterey County Genealogy:

"The Old Washington Hotel was California's first hotel and stood on the northwest corner of Washington and Pearl streets. The building was erected in 1832 and for a few years was the private residence of Don Enrique Montenegro.

"The hotel, which was fifty feet in width and over two hundred feet in length was built of adobe in 1840, the adobe being obtained from the rear of the San Carlos Church. The trees which were cut down to make way for the building were used to support the roof. The building would accommodate over a hundred lodgers.

"A nest of gamblers, fifty in number, arrived in Monterey, May 12, 1847, and opened up a 'monte' game in the Washington Hotel. Then Alcalde Walter Colton took a file of soldiers and surrounded the place, arresting the whole outfit. He took them into the bar, told them about the schoolhouse he was building, and fined them $20 each. The proprietor was fined $100 — which made a nice sum toward the building of Colton Hall. After the discovery of gold, it became the gambling headquarters of the town.

"In 1849 during the Constitutional Convention the hotel was leased for $1200 per month, its rates being then $200 a month without board.

"It is at this site where, at ten o'clock on the evening of June 18, 1856, Mr. Lewis Belcher was shot while sitting at the bar, a victim of the infamous Belcher-Roach vendetta murders.

"The Old Washington Hotel was torn down in 1914-15, it too becoming a victim of progress."

So it had quite a history from 1832 until 1914!

Here's an 1894 photograph of the hotel from the Library of Congress:

A little more about the hotel and its intriguing history can be found in the blog post "A Mystery in History."

Footnote
1. The PCK Series and its logo were previously discussed in this August 2013 post.

The Crock of Gold (wool blanket ephemera)

Here's a new category for the blog — blanket ephemera.

This is the small tag that's sew into a multicolored wool blanket that's been in our family for decades.

The company producing this 100% wool, hand-dyed, handwoven blanket was called The Crock of Gold. Its logo consisted of a rainbow, a pot of gold and what looks like a gnarled, bent-over tree.¹

The blanket was produced in the Irish Republic. If we take those two words, in that order, at face value, that means we can possibly date this blanket's creation to sometime between 1919 to 1922. That's when the Irish Republic (Saorstát Éireann) was in its short period of existence, to be replaced by the Irish Free State and Northern Ireland, under the Partition of Ireland.

Footnote
1. Or maybe it's a gnarled hand holding a cloud or a fistful of wool.