Antique & Vintage Postcards

Four massive brick smokestacks billow dark plumes into a pale sky above the Worcester Salt Factory at Silver Springs, New York — a striking monument to the industrial ambition that made the Genesee Valley one of America's great salt-producing regions in the early twentieth century. With a boasted capacity of over 500,000 pounds of salt per day, the Worcester Salt Company's Silver Springs plant was a marvel of Gilded Age engineering, drawing brine from deep underground deposits laid down by ancient seas. The card was printed in Germany — standard practice before World War I, when German chromolithography was considered the finest in the world — and published by Worcester Salt Co. itself as a piece of corporate self-promotion. The undivided-back style (message on front only) and one-cent domestic postage instruction place this firmly in the 1901–1907 Pioneer era of American deltiology.