Antique & Vintage Postcards

Dozens of workers fan out across a vivid crimson bog under a wide Cape Cod sky, bent low with wooden-toothed scooping rakes, their straw hats and bright work clothes rendered in the saturated, almost painterly palette that made Tichnor Brothers' linen cards icons of mid-century American tourism. The scene — dry-harvesting by hand, a method that had defined Cape Cod's cranberry industry since the 1840s — captures an agricultural tradition that would begin yielding to mechanized wet-harvesting within a generation. Wooden crates overflow with brilliant red berries at the bog's edge, and a Model A-era automobile is just visible in the distance near the white farm buildings. Published by the Mayflower Sales Co. of Provincetown and printed by Tichnor Bros. of Boston, this linen card carries the evocative back text noting that cranberries are "indigenous to Cape Cod" and that "an army of scoopers" skims the bogs for "the delectable Feast of Thanksgiving."