Going to Florida...

...Key West, to be exact. This post card is number 82 in a series of Florida scenes published by the Asheville Post Card Company in Asheville, North

Carolina. It is a depiction of The Overseas Railroad. This railroad was an extension of the Florida East Coast Railway to Key West, located 128 miles beyond the end of the Florida peninsula. Work on the line started in 1905 and was completed in 1912; the line was in daily passenger and freight service until its destruction by a hurricane in 1935. It was not an easy task building the railroad from one island to the other. Hurricanes in 1909 and 1910 destroyed much of the completed railroad. This was the dream of Henry Flagler. On January 22, 1912, Henry, by then blind, arrived in Key West aboard his private rail car "Rambler". His dream had become a reality. Nine years before the system was destroyed by the hurricane, Frank Etzcorn went from Flint, Michigan to the most southern tip of Florida - sort of following in Henry Flagler's footsteps. It is because of Frank that I have this card in my collection. He sent the message below

to his wife. I know it was his wife because he begins the message with "Dear Wife". He sent the post card on January 3, 1926 - not usually hurricane season in Florida; but, not the best of weather in Michigan. As you can see at the top of the scan here to our right, the post card was published by the Asheville Post Card Company. It was a major publisher of linen postcards that went on to produce photochromes. Their cards were manufactured by many different printers. This firm seems to have been founded by Lamar Campbell LeCompte and J.L. Widman though Widman soon left the company. LeCompte may have been publishing postcards in Ashville going back to 1910, the year he moved there. After LeComte’s death in 1977 the company continued to publish postcards as well as sell novelties, but they were eventually taken over by Aerial Photography Services. They could be found at 31 Carolina Avenue in Asheville, North Carolina from 1921 to 1982.

Riding into History

The White Mountain Railroad was the only steam powered passenger tourist train in the state of Arizona. It traveled over some of the most beautiful country of the Southwest U.S. The railroad used two engines. Engine number 36, formerly ran on the Sierra Railroad in California. It was built in 1930 as a Mikado (2-8-2). Engine number 100, seen here on the front of this post

card, was also a Mikado. It was built by Baldwin in June of 1926 and was used on the Santa Maria Valley Railroad, also in California. Here is a little bit of history about the White Mountain Scenic Railroad as taken from this website: www.islandpondrailroad.com/wmsrr/wmsrr.htm The White Mountain Scenic Railroad August 14, 1974. In the last days of the White Mountain Scenic Railroad. The train began operating north from Pinetop Lakes, Arizona, to Bell. This is a much less scenic section of track compared to the former stretch from McNary to a picnic spot the crews called "Apache Hilton". In the very early days, trains actually went as far as an old logging camp called Maverick. All of those days are long gone. The railroad was pulled up on the Fort Apache reservation and both Mikados #36 (ex-Sierra Railroad) and #100 (ex-Santa Maria Valley) were trucked to Heber City, Utah to pull the "Heber Creepers". Both locomotives are now stored, allegedly on display, in poor condition on the Kepner estate in Merrill, Oregon.

The post card was published by Arizona Pictures, Box 635, Sedona, Arizona. With generic words like these in the name, I could not find anything about the history of the publisher. The photo was taken by Merle Porter. Porter, Merle (1907-1988) Merle was known as “the postcard king of the west.” He produced and distributed his “photo-color” postcards under the name Royal Pictures of Colton, California. Porter traveled nine months out of the year for over fifty years – putting as many as one thousand miles a week on his Ford Econoline van – photographing the historic sites, monuments, architecture, highways, infrastructure, oil fields, and landscapes of the western United States in color using his Speed Graphic view camera. While traveling he distributed his postcards to motels, souvenir shops, and gas stations, circulating one million postcards per year at the height of his career. Porter wrote lengthy and descriptive captions full of historical facts and local lore to be printed on the back of each postcard. This information was taken from this website: https://www.mocp.org/detail.php?type=related&kv=8486&t=people