Antique & Vintage Postcards

Bathed in the warm pastels of a Massachusetts summer, this Edwardian color-lithograph card captures the ivy-draped Episcopal Church and its turreted Victorian rectory in Great Barrington — a Berkshire Hills town that was already drawing cultured city refugees from New York and Boston when this card was printed. The hand-applied color gives the stone church tower and the rectory's conical turret a painterly glow that plain photography could never match, and the lush green lawn reads almost like an advertisement for Gilded Age gentility. The card carries the same December 5, 1905 patent number (806631) seen on companion New Orleans issues from the same publisher, suggesting a national souvenir-card program; a second brass eyelet fastener is still present, implying this card was once part of a leporello folder similar to PC-00100. Publisher's catalog number is L.G.L. 60258.