Murphy Library News

Unveiling history through Murphy Library's postcard collection

By Laura Godden (she/her/hers)

Special Collections Historian Laura Godden highlighted Murphy Library’s postcard collection and gave a tour of its Special Collections/Area Research Center (SC/ARC) archives at this year’s Wisconsin Historical Society (WHS) Local History and Historic Preservation Conference. The conference took place on October 19-20 and had not been held in La Crosse since 2017.  

Around fifty people attended Godden’s presentation titled, “Postmarked for Local History.” The talk focused on the role that postcards can play in local history research. In 2015, Godden, and fellow archivist Paul Beck, wrote a book illustrating the history of La Crosse utilizing around 200 postcard images from the library’s collection.  

The presentation covered the history of postcards, starting with their first appearance in the mid-1800s and their spike in popularity following the 1893 Chicago World Fair, and noted how postcards share many similarities with today’s social media.  

Postcards are a helpful medium for history as they are familiar to both the public of the past and today, are widely made for communities of all sizes all over the world, and capture an impressive range of the human experience. Postcards can depict everything from the mundane to the spectacular and often show things that don’t typically make it into history books, like ordinary people at work, landmarks, humor, advertisements, private homes, celebrations, infrastructure improvements, interesting trends (like goat-cart photography), and local disasters and deaths. 

The main focus of Godden’s talk was on the peak postcardmania years (circa 1906-1920). While finding pre-1903 postcards is rare, over 1 billion postcards were sent through the mail in 1913 alone! Because collecting was so huge, about half the postcards purchased were never even sent through the mail.  

Since postcardmania coincided with a period of rapid and significant technological advancement, those societal changes are often reflected in the postcards themselves. Thus, they can be used to produce a pictorial timeline of happenings that average people found important, as the postcard images had to have enough popular appeal to sell, especially to women who sent 3 to 4 times more postcards than men.  

SC/ARC has been collecting postcards since its inception in 1968. So far, it has amassed somewhere around 2,500-3,000 postcards. In the past, postcards were often considered unacademic and thus are an underutilized resource. However, they are one of the largest and most significant reserves of original historic images.  

Thanks largely to the vision and leadership of emeritus archivist Ed Hill, Murphy Library has always been ahead of the curve in collecting postcards and, as a result, has a robust collection to tap for research and projects. Godden has noticed that speaking and writing about postcards has increased the community’s interest in SC/ARC.