Antique & Vintage Postcards

Nestled among tall New England pines, the stone Gothic Revival chapel at Haw's Memorial in Leominster, Massachusetts glows with hand-tinted warmth in this crisp early-1900s chromolithograph printed in Germany — a reminder of when American publishers routinely sent their finest postcard work overseas for superior color reproduction. The small chapel, built of rough-cut granite with a lancet window above its modest porch, sits on a curved gravel drive surrounded by manicured lawn, typical of the rural cemetery chapel aesthetic that flourished in the late Victorian and Edwardian eras. Leominster, a Worcester County city best known as the "Pioneer Plastic City" and birthplace of Johnny Appleseed, supported a lively postcard trade in the early 1900s. Haw's Memorial Chapel served as a cemetery gatehouse or mortuary chapel; the building's intimate scale and handsome stonework made it a natural subject for the souvenir postcard market. The back carries the undivided/early divided format with a "Domestic One Cent / Foreign Two Cents" postage instruction box, consistent with the 1901–1907 era, and was printed by a publisher using the "MCo" trademark. Card is unused with a penciled dealer price of $1.00/221.