A long red-brick engineering building stretches across a manicured campus lawn under a painterly sunset sky, early Model T automobiles lined up along the drive — this vivid linen-era view of Rose Polytechnic Institute in Terre Haute, Indiana pulses with the optimism of an institution training the engineers who would build twentieth-century America. Founded in 1874 through the bequest of Chauncey Rose, the school — today known as Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology and consistently ranked among the top undergraduate engineering colleges in the nation — was still a compact, focused campus when this card was published by Levin Brothers of Terre Haute. The message side carries a chatty note in blue ink sent to a woman named Mary in Washington, D.C., describing a stop in Terre Haute, and bears a 1-cent green Benjamin Franklin stamp postmarked in the 1920s. The sender mentions attending something at the school and finding the city beautiful — a tiny window into a traveler's impressions of mid-America between the wars.