Just Little Ol' Me

I am rather disappointed about the amount of information that I can attach to this post card. It was published by Frank H. Leid out of Salt Lake City, Utah. It is post card number 1703 in his series of post cards. It is obviously a picture of the Lucin Cut-off trestle.

I have searched for information on Frank H. Leid, but can find extremely little. There is one post card on a website for sale that was also published by his company. It is a picture of a statue monument in Salt Lake City. I have only 3 in my collection that involve Frank. Two were published by him and one is one of his photographs published by H H Tammen Curio Co. His style of publishing is similar to the Detroit Photographic Co. The picture is on the card and the information about the card and the publisher is in red ink at the bottom. We can deduce from the picture that we are looking west from Midlake (the shadows on the decking tell us that). The back of the post card shows that it was probably printed in Germany. There is an eagle with spread wings over a round symbol with what looks like the letters K, E and C in it. Here is a close-up of the entire symbol followed by a very close-up of the circle with the letters. If you know anything about this I would love to hear from you. Just add it to the comment section.

It also has the message to the purchaser, “THIS SIDE IS FOR THE ADDRESS.” So, we know that this card was printed between March 1904 (when the trestle was opened) and March 1, 1907 (when you could write on the back of the cards). We can see that someone had this in an album because the corners are faded.

The reason that I chose this post card is that I think that I now possess a piece of the handrail that is shown so clearly in this picture. There is a company that purchased the trestle from the railroad and it is slowly taking the trestle apart and selling the wood. The long and short of coversations with a representative from the company, is that I sent them 24 scans of post cards of the trestle from my collection and they sent me a plank of wood (1 x 6 x 18 inches) and a spike from the trestle. That size of wood looks like it would have been part of the railing around the trestle as illustrated by this post card.