Bare-branched elms line the broad central path of Lynn Common on an early spring day, their stark silhouettes framing a view east toward the redbrick civic buildings that defined one of Massachusetts' great industrial shoe-making cities — a city that by 1908 produced more shoes per capita than anywhere on earth. This richly colored Litho-Chrome card, published by the New England News Company of Boston and printed by the Leipzig-Berlin-Dresden trade to the highest chromolithographic standards, captures the Common's iron fence enclosures and telegraph poles with photographic precision tinted in soft greens and ambers. On the reverse, an apologetic note from a friend to Jennie in Dorchester — "I am sorry I wasn't at home the day you called, but we had only gone away for the day so I came again" — is a perfectly ordinary slice of Edwardian social life, mailed from Lynn on August 21, 1908, with a 1¢ Benjamin Franklin stamp.