Antique & Vintage Postcards

A hand-tinted linen-era beauty mailed from Cincinnati in April 1925, this colorful card captures Old Saint John's Church in Richmond, Virginia — one of America's most hallowed colonial landmarks — its white clapboard walls and red-capped steeple rising serenely above a churchyard thick with old-growth oaks and blooming flower beds. The scene fairly glows with the warm palette of Louis Kaufmann's celebrated American Art series, the stained-glass lancet windows rendered in jewel tones of amber and green. Built on the site of a former Native American settlement, the original structure was completed in 1741 and gained immortality in 1775 when Patrick Henry electrified the Virginia Convention with his "Give me liberty, or give me death!" speech within these very walls. Addressed to a Mr. F. M. Anderson at 606 Hudson Ave., Peoria, Illinois (R.R. 4 Box 80), the card bears a crisp Cincinnati, Ohio duplex cancel dated April 2, 1925, and a used 1-cent green Franklin stamp — a vivid snapshot of an era when postcards carried history across the miles.