Postcards from My Grandmother's Attic

Scenic views of Kansas, Oklahoma and the Ozarks
in the early 1900s

From the collection of Neil Allen Bristow

My late grandmother, Blossom Lowe (1885-1990), came of age before the telephone was in wide use — and long before the Internet. She and her family and friends kept in touch by dashing off quick notes to one another on postcards, much as we would dial the phone or type out a brief e-mail. Of course a hundred years ago, mail was picked up and delivered twice a day, and since almost every little town was on a rail line with frequent service, letters and cards could reach their recipients within a day or two, unless they had to travel across the country.

My grandmother (and I suspect her mother as well) was a packrat. She held on to everything. Even though she moved frequently in her young adulthood, somehow she managed to keep a fair amount of her correspondence. She grew up in and near Neodesha, Kansas, and moved with her parents to Sapulpa, Indian Territory, as a young woman. There she met a young Kentuckian, Julius Lucien Bristow (1884-1971).

Blossom and Lucien Bristow moving from Southwest City to Noel, Missouri.

They were married in 1906. Lucien worked as a technician setting up early telephone and electric companies, traveling from one small town to another, around Oklahoma and into the Ozarks. Later he spent some time in the Black Hills of South Dakota. The young couple even took a stab at farming, an idea which sounded better than the reality proved. Throughout their wanderings, the cards kept flowing — to and from Blossom's mother, Mary Catherine Johnson Lowe (1860-1933?), and her cousins and aunts and uncles, who were scattered in towns within a couple of hundred miles.

As the picture here shows, Blossom was also an enthusiastic early adopter of Mr Eastman's new-fangled personal camera, the Kodak, which she used to record their adventures.

The scenic cards reproduced here are but a small sampling of the trove I inherited. In collection there are a few plain manila Post Office cards, as well as many greeting cards for special occasions — birthdays, Christmas, and New Years, and a few comic "joke" cards that might raise a few eyebrows in our more enlightened (or at least more P. C.) time. When I decided to share some of the material on the Web, I decided to start with scenic views which capture a now-vanished era. I'll probably add more images as I get around to it.

To speed up browsing, I have grouped small images (50+, so far) into geographic pages. On each page they are arranged by location. Larger images can be viewed by clicking on the pictures. I did clean up some of the images a little, mostly removing smudged cancellation marks, and increasing the brightness a bit, but I did not mess with the colors. You are welcome to download any images you like. Since these are heirlooms, helping to document our family history, none of the originals are for sale.

• Oklahoma - Two pages of images of Oklahoma.
• Ozarks - Two pages of scenes from southwestern Missouri, northwestern Arkansas, and eastern Oklahoma.
• Kansas - A few scenes from the Sunflower State.
• Black Hills - Scenes from western South Dakota
• Kansas City - A few scenes from Kansas City - Everything's up to date!
• Holidays - Two pages of Holiday Greeting and Novelty Cards

I was inspired to create these pages, to go along with my other family history pages, by the excellent Northern Kentucky Views site, put together by Bernie Spencer. It's well worth a visit.