Antique & Vintage Postcards

Perched magnificently on a rolling green hilltop above the gentle Pennsylvania countryside, the grand Victorian Gothic campus of Seton Hill College commands the landscape in this warm linen-era aerial view — its red-brick towers and slate roofs glowing against a dreamy sunset sky of peach and rose. Founded by the Sisters of Charity and named for Saint Elizabeth Ann Seton, America's first native-born saint, the college in Greensburg welcomed its first students in 1885 and would go on to become Seton Hill University in 2002. On the back, a charming snapshot of 1930s pen-pal culture survives: a young woman named Myrtle, writing from Greensburg in September 1936, introduces herself to Grace with disarming openness — "18 yrs old, brunette, brown eyes, 5'7" height, 175 lb weight" — listing hobbies of dancing, swimming, reading, and letter-writing, and asking whether Grace lives near Youngstown. The card, franked with a 1-cent green Washington stamp and postmarked Greensburg, September 15, 1936, traveled to Miss Grace at 114 E. Kline St., Girard, Ohio.