A Greeting from Lockport

This Rotograph, number G 5632, is similar to the company's C 5630a, which I included in an earlier post about the Erie Canal. It shows a cascade of five locks on the canal in the aptly named Lockport, New York. Wheatlet, advertised at left, was a cereal manufactured by the Franklin Mills Co., which was based in Lockport.

The card was addressed to a Mr. Edwin W. Scott at 33 Elberon Place, Albany, New York, and the "Papa Will" referred to in the message was probably William M. Scott, a watchmaker who resided at that address in 1901 according to an Albany city directory. The Lester Greff (and Mary) mentioned may be the same couple who feature in legal documents regarding an ugly probate dispute adjudicated by the New York Supreme Court (Appellate Division, Third Department) in 1947. The decedent was Joseph Charles Greff of Albany, who had been judged "insane" and committed to the State Mental Institution, where he married a nurse. Lester Greff contended that his father had not been "of sound mind" at the time of his will, which established the wife, Ella Havens Greff, as his sole legatee.

If Edwin Scott was a relatively young child when this card was mailed, he may be the Edwin W. Scott whose automobile was struck by a trolley car in 1922, and who subsequently sued the trolley company (the United Traction Company) in a case heard before the same Appellate Division court. That Edwin Scott was twenty-two at the time of the accident, and thus would have been born around 1900.

The sender and date of mailing are unknown.

High Rock

Rotograph's scenic view cards don't typically emphasize recognizable human figures, although they occasionally include a few for scale or as an indication of local color. If nothing else, to the extent that these postcards were intended as evidence of having visited a landmark, it might have been considered distracting to have other people depicted in one's souvenirs. This view of Sacandaga Park in the Adirondacks is a bit of an exception. Its aesthetic is more reminiscent of the Real Photo postcards that amateur photographers captured of their own family and friends, except that the group in this case is made up of people who were strangers to the sender and recipient. Perhaps the photographer just liked the composition.

The geological feature shown here lent its name to a popular inn, the High Rock Lodge. Donald R. Williams provides the lodge's history in his book Adirondack Hotels and Inns:

High Rock Lodge owed its popularity to the Sacandaga Amusement Park, the "Coney Island of the Adirondacks." Built on a hillside overlooking the park, it attracted hikers, tourists, parkgoers, and entertainers over its 50-year history. The lodge, operating as a farmhouse inn, was built in 1901 by James Hull for Reuben D. Buckingham. The large rock... located on the site, became a popular hiking destination for the thousands who came to enjoy the Sacandaga Park attractions. In 1940, Ashley and Mildred Dawes purchased the three-story, 54-room hostelry and operated it as a summer lodge and cottages, along with a restaurant. It burned on August 22, 1951.

This particular copy was mailed in 1905 to a Rural Delivery address in Olean, NY.

Watkins Glen

Here's how Bradford Van Diver, in Roadside Geology of New York, describes Watkins Glen in western New York State:

This is the best known of the Finger Lakes glens and certainly one of the most beautiful places in Eastern North America. Here, Glen Creek has cut a deep and unusually narrow gorge into the thin-bedded Enfield siltstones and shales belonging to the late Devonian Sonyea group that overlies the Genesee group. Because of the relatively uniform resistance of the rocks to erosion, the gorge does not have large falls... The stream twists and turns in a tortuous manner, leaving overhanging walls where meanders have drifted sideways as they cut rapidly downward.

The unnumbered Rotograph postcard at the top of this post shows an evocative (if not quite convincingly colored) view of the gorge, but the one below (5082 a.) may be of special interest for the postcard historian. Depicting a feature called "the Card-Rack," it appears to document a practice of leaving postcards and letters at a selected location in the glen.

Were these missives votive offerings, or love charms like the locks on Paris's Pont des Arts, or just mementos recording that "So-and-so was here"? I haven't been able to find any other record of the practice or when it was discontinued; I suspect that park authorities would frown on it today. Any information would be appreciated.

Trees

The muted aesthetic of these Rotographs sets them apart from the multicolored scenic view cards. Except for the first, which reads "Picturesque Lake Geneva NY" in a partially cropped-off caption at the bottom, none of the locations are identified. Most have a slight bluish cast, not entirely captured in these scans, that Rotograph compared, rather optimistically, to Delft china. Three have markings on the back indicating that they were included in Rotograph's "Landscape View Serie [sic] A."

It's hard to believe that these subtle images were ever able to compete with all the livelier and more colorful postcards on the market, but at the height of the postcard bubble no doubt some companies felt free to experiment a bit with alternative approaches. At least when grouped together, they still provoke an appealing mood of quiet respite.

The Erie Canal

The construction of the Erie Canal was one of the key engineering and political accomplishments of the nineteenth century, so it's no surprise that Rotograph's photographers captured many scenes of its 363-mile passage through a varied landscape of rural areas, city centers, and industrial zones. Most of the images below, which I have arranged in rough geographical order from east to west, are from Postcards from the New York Waterways: 1898-1923, an admirable online project created by the Queens College School of Library Science. [Unfortunately, as of March 2013, the project seems to have vanished.] An additional archive of images is housed at eriecanal.org.