I blogged about this place - Shasta Springs - back on April 19, 2014; but, there was a different post card picture featured then. It was published by the Newman Post Card Company. These two post cards were both printed by Edward Mitchell out of San Francisco - just like the post card from last week's blog. These both show the very popular tourist spot in northern California, Shasta Springs. In the late 1800s and early 1900s people used to flock to a summer resort on the Sacrament River for their health and enjoyment. It was so popular that the Southern Pacific Railroad built a train station for those who were going to disembark there. It was near the small town of Dunsmuir, California whose population came in at 1,650 in the 2010 census. Dunsmuir is where the Southern Pacific makes a couple of wicked hairpin turns to get up the river valley.

The resort closed in the early 1950s when it was sold and continues to be owned by the Saint Germain Foundation, and is used as a major facility by that organization (you can look up this organization on Wikipedia). It is no longer open to the public and the lower part of the resort - the bottling plant, the train station, the incline railway, the kiosk and the fountains are all gone. The falls that were visible from the railroad tracks and what ruins are left of the lower part of the resort are all overgrown by blackberry bushes.

Here is what the back of the post cards look like - a typical Edward Mitchell look. The bottom post card has a very short message written on it. According to this article, that message is not so innocent.... http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2014/06/sex_and_pop_the_forgotten_1909_hit_that_introduced_adultery_to_american.html

In the spring of 1909, American popular song got sexy. Of course, love and courtship, and by extension sex, had been Topic A in pop music for decades. But while songwriters had long trafficked in euphemisms and innuendo—coy talk of “sighing” and “spooning” beneath the old oak tree and by the light of the silvery moon—it was a 1909 hit by composer Harry Von Tilzer and lyricist Jimmy Lucas, “I Love, I Love, I Love My Wife—But Oh! You Kid!,” which opened Tin Pan Alley to brasher, bawdier, more raucously comic songs of lust. The comment written upside down and on a slant on the back of this post card is ......... "Oh, you kid."