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photo by Postcards courtesy Freeborn County Historical Museum
The message expressed on this postcard helps to reflect the feelings so many people have for the ending of one year and the start of a new year.
Postcard greetings for a new year
Published Saturday, January 3, 2009
Postcards courtesy Freeborn County Historical Museum
The message expressed on this postcard helps to reflect the feelings so many people have for the ending of one year and the start of a new year.
Postcards courtesy Freeborn County Historical Museum
Midnight is obviously the theme of this old postcard when the old year ends and a new year starts. The timepiece shown may be an artist’s version of a Black Forest cuckoo clock. However, it’s debatable if such a clock ever existed.
Postcards courtesy Freeborn County Historical Museum
Here’s a postcard which helps to emphasize the wintery weather in this part of the nation. Incidentally, the tall spire on this church isn’t exactly an exaggeration, but reflects what can still be seen on several area places of worship.
Postcards courtesy Freeborn County Historical Museum
This postcard is evidently trying to emphasize that the poinsettia plant, which originated in old Mexico, has a close association with New Year’s Day.
Editor’s note: This is the second of two parts.
There’s a large oblong box filled with several hundred postcards in the archives of the Freeborn County Historical Museum Library which are filed by holidays and special occasions. Leading off this collection is a surprising number of old postcards based on New Year’s Day.
Many of these postcards have postmarks from other localities and were mailed to people in this area about a century ago. Proof for this last part can be easily detected because of the one cent stamps used for the postage, plus the dates shown on the postmarks.
Some of the postcards were mailed by people living in Albert Lea and addressed to friends and relatives living in rural areas. In that era, traveling by horse-drawn sleds and buggies could be rather challenging because of adverse weather conditions.
A few of those postcards have messages or greetings written in Norwegian, which was once the second most used language in Freeborn County.
However, a surprising number of the cards in the museum’s archives are plain and have never been used. One could speculate that the purchasers either forgot to use the cards, or liked to collect this type of American artwork.
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