Back at the Beginning

Sometimes I can be a little slow. I do have my post cards arranged in albums by certain themes. And, within each album, there is a sub-theme. For example, the Mt. Lowe cards are in Album Number Two. It has the themes of California, Utah and New Hampshire. Within California I have sub-themes like Mt. Tamalpais, Knott’s Berry Farm, Angels Flight and California in general. But, within each sub-theme, like Mt. Lowe, they are only organized by similar looking cards. There is no real order to the cards. Today, we get to experience the result of this lack of order. I started the Mt. Lowe exhibition by being at the bottom of the incline that took people to the top of Echo Mountain. On those cards, one can see that there is a trolley at the bottom left. People had to take that trolley up the hill in order to get to the bottom of the incline. These two cards today are pictures of those trolleys. I should have started this exhibit with these two cards. Oh, well. At least you get to see them.

They are both from the “white border” era, which is approximately from 1915 to 1930. The card on the right seems to be the older of the two, in my estimation. The picture is an actual photograph. It was then printed and colorized. The card on the left is a “reproduction” of the original. It looks like they projected the photograph onto a plate and drew the key features onto it. It is like they changed just enough detail so as not to infringe on the copyright of the first. They are published by two different companies.

The one on the bottom, the photograph on the right (above), is by the C. T. American Art company. The C.T. stands for Curt Teich. Curt immigrated to the United States from Lobenstein, Germany, in 1896 at the ripe old age of 19. He started his printing company two years later and it operated until 1978. He was on the leading edge of printing techniques several times. There is a number at the top of the card: R-53765. When one compares this to the “Guide to Dating Curt Teich Postcards” one can conclude that it was printed around 1914. This also makes sense because this card is from the white border era which began around 1915. The top card was printed by the E. C. Kropp Company out of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. This company published and printed chromolithographic souvenir cards and private mailing cards in 1898 under the name Kropp. These cards were of much higher quality than those that were printed under the E.C. Kropp name. They became the E.C. Kropp Company in 1907 and produced large numbers of national view-cards and other subjects. Their post cards from the “Linen Era” had a noticeably fine grain. IN 1956, the company was sold to the L.L. Cook Company the last I heard they are now part of the GAF Corp.