Pike’s Peak at Night

Today we are looking at Pike’s Peak lit up by the moon.

The caption at the bottom of the card reads: “Summit of Pikes Peak, Colorado Altitude 14147 feet.” You can see the moon peaking from behind the clouds in the upper right hand corner. There are four men to the left of the steam engine and passenger car. My imagination allows me to think that the two in the back are looking for a nickel that one of them dropped while the two in the front are examining the tracks, wondering how the heck they were able to get up that steep hill. The building is showing the improvements made to the original weather station that was erected on the summit. This one looks like it has the souvenir shop, guest rooms, diner, and observation tower. The front of the card shows us that it is from between 1907 and 1915.

The back of the card says the same thing.

It is from the Divided Back Era. The postage box in the upper right tells us that it cost only one cent to send this card to the USA, Cuba, Canal Zone, Hawaii, Mexico, Philippines, and Porto Rico. All else costs two cents.

This information is from the Metropolitan Postcard Club website: The eagle sitting on the shield tells us that the publisher of this card was the Illustrated Post Card Company. They were in business from 1905 to 1914. Their office was located at 520 West 84th Street, New York, NY. They produced a wide variety of tinted halftone postcards in series that were printed by Emil Pinkau in Leipzig, Saxony, Germany. Each city or location of their color card sets was assigned the same number prefix. They also published an unnumbered series of chromolithographic fine art cards that were printed in Dresden. Many of their early cards do not have their name on them, only their distinct eagle logo.

Up the left side of this post card one can see their other logo plus a prefix number. It is a 6 followed by a dash 9. “6.-9” So, the six must mean either Denver, Colorado Springs or just the state of Colorado. Their best known cards are from a very large set that captured scenes throughout the City of New York. These cards tended to use brighter than average colors and were titled in a very distinct font. Similar cards, but with more subdued writing, appeared afterwards depicting scenes from the surrounding regions such as Long Island.

In 1909 they stopped importing cards from Germany and began printing their own. A large number of black & white cards were produced in a more open halftone with some being poorly hand colored. These black & white cards were numbered consecutively.



From the information above we can now say that the card was printed between 1907 (divided era begins on March 1, 1907) and 1909 (when this company stopped importing from Germany).