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1. This kind of “greetings” card with a decorative drawing was common until around 1904 when inexpensive Kodak postcard-format cameras and pre-printed postcard paper first became available. The name of “Davisville” was changed to “Davis” around 1907. 

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2. The four-story Buena Vista was a Davis “train station” hotel from 1907 until it burned less than a decade later. 

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3. Downtown Davis looks unimpressive in scale on July 4th, 1906, just before the University Farm stimulated an investment boom. The photo and card were among the hundreds of skillfully done urban scenes produced at Shinkle’s Photography Studio in Woodland. 

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4. This view of Downtown Woodland at the same time (around 1906) shows taller buildings and a more thriving Main Street scene. Before long, Woodland’s Main Street would be paved, a decade before G Street in Davis also removed its potholes. 

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5. The new University Farm around 1910 already has a impressive cluster of large and tall structures that is effectively captured on this McCurry Photography Company (of Sacramento) card. 

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6. This “made in Germany” card around 1910 shows the then-standard two-part side for address and for message. Not until shortly after 1900 did the U.S. postal service allow the “address and stamp” side to also contain the sender’s hand-written message. At that time,Germany’s biggest cities and the London area were home to producers of most of the world’s best artistic postcards. 

“Greetings From Davisville” -- Early Postcard Views and Messages
from the Collection of Jan and Carroll Cross
By Dennis Dingemans and Merrily DuPree

The Hattie Weber Museum of Davis is now exhibiting a selection of black and white photographic postcards loaned to the Museum from the collection assembled by Jan Cross and Carroll Cross of Davis. The Cross family, including their two young children, began collecting postcards in the 1970s and by 1978 their “local history” cards of Woodland, Davis, and the University Farm were put on display in the Woodland Library. Jan and Carroll selected 36 cards for that show from the 1900 to 1940 “golden age of American photographic postcards” and the Daily Democrat’s review of that show headlined that “Postcards Assist Study of History.” A majority of their cards depicted the downtown business districts of the two towns. Images showed train stations, trackside industry, and “Main Street” commercial buildings. Big buildings were featured: stone fronted structures, three-story hotels, ornate banks, stables and garages, steepled churches, and schools. On the campus, the Creamery, the 4-story water tower, the livestock judging pavilion, North and West Hall dormitories, the quad, and the shops were depicted (as expected) but images also showed “wild and romantic” Putah Creek and “students at play” swimming in the irrigation tank.

Cattle are depicted on two fascinating cards. One is of a Grand Champion (purple ribbon winner) cow named Lula Mayflower from the campus that wowed the judges at the 1921 Chicago International Livestock Exhibition. The other is the most rare and valuable card in our show: a 1906 image of the Sparks Ranch houses and barns with a herd of 25 black cattle in the foreground. No campus buildings had yet been built on the campus that was soon to occupy that spot. The photo is by the Woodland professional photographer Shinkle who used his 1903 Kodak 3A Postcard Camera and “Real Photo” paper to produce the card.

For the Museum’s show, Jan and Carroll Cross have generously loaned the 36 cards from that 1978 exhibit and added 50 more cards that have additional early photographs of Davis and the UC Davis campus.

Jan found it useful for her occupation as a teacher (and teaching supervisor) in Woodland and Knights Landing schools to possess cards that depict local history. Carroll collected cards of old sanatoriums to illustrate his UCD Medical School courses on tuberculosis. Their boys collected cards of the Lake Tahoe and the Fallen Leaf Lake area where they vacationed. The family has many cards that help them remember their mutual hometowns of Pittsburgh and Cleveland. They collect cards that depict dogs and their favorite sport of tennis.

The senior Crosses wryly comments on the wild inflation of prices for rare postcards, whether they are bought at yard sales, flea markets, or at weekend postcard-collectors exhibits. Back in 1978, it was reported that when Carroll once paid $8 for a single card, “it was much to his wife’s consternation.” Today’s prices for vintage postcards often reach the $50 to $100 level. The Crosses 40 years ago attended a twice annual postcard collectors sale in the Bay Area. Those sales have proliferated. Sacramento now has its own annual postcard sale. The hobby of collecting postcards is said to be equally popular today with the big two collection hobbies – collecting stamps and collecting coins. Since the 1940’s the term for the card collection habit has been “deltiology,” a word derived from the Greek for little writing tablets.

The Museum’s exhibit puts the Cross Family collection, which includes about 200 black and white cards with photo images of Davis, in perspective. Local historian John Lofland has a quantitatively similar collection of Davis cards. His three Arcadia Publications photo-history books contain a good many postcard images from libraries and archives as well as images from his own collection. Local jewelry and metals dealer, Pete Richards, has many hundreds of Davis-area images; he collects cards for profit as well as for his own appreciation of depictions of local history. The undisputed king of postcard collectors in Yolo County is David Herbst of Esparto, who has amassed thousands of old black and white postcards of the towns in our county. Dennis is also a small-time collector of postcards; his deltiological centerpiece is a single album of 90 cards that were sent between his grandparents while courting in 1910 or were sent from him and his 5 siblings to his mom during their national and world travels between 1962 and 1982. Write to the newsletter or to the Museum to tell us about your postcard collections.

The Museum’s exhibit includes a short history of postcards and of deltiology. In 1861, the first post cards mailed in the U.S.A. had a decorative border and a stamp box on a single side. Shortly after, Congress authorized “official” Post Office postcards that could be mailed for one cent while requiring a two-cent stamp on all privately printed cards. Elaborately decorated cards were sold as souvenirs at the 1893 Columbian Exposition, setting off the “golden age of postcards” between then and 1940. By 1907 regulations allowed the address and the message to share the stamped side while an image (increasingly a photograph) occupied the other full side. A national craze for sending postcards was aided greatly by the Eastman-Kodak “3A Folding Pocket Camera.” That ingenious innovation of 1903 was sold with Kodak’s “Real Photo” paper that had the address/message side pre-printed. Amateurs as well as professionals now could easily make photo postcards. “Linen cards” were in vogue during the 1930s, printed in color on textured paper. Color “photo-chrome cards” after World War II looked very much like the vividly colored postcards you still see in souvenir outlets.

The Museum’s postcard show discusses the content of the messages added by senders. One theme emphasizes the good jobs and economic boost provided by the new college campus: “we are living here now . . . it is better work and it is so nice here;” “Harry is trying to get a ranch job here, he has a couple of jobs in sight;” “this is the dormitory on which Otto has been working . . . he is now receiving $3.50 a day and his boss has raised his wages;” “Davis is expecting great things to happen since getting the farm . . . there will be nice buildings erected and great improvements made.”

The good news of well paying University jobs is in contrast to a spirit of pessimism and criticism of the town of Davis: “the Farm is a very large place, in fact it is larger than the town itself;” “well, I am back among the hayseeds again . . . we play at Richmond next Sunday . . . I see that Antioch, Martinez, and Crockett will be in the league next year;” “well here is a card to start with and as soon as I can scrape together enough news in this one-horse town to fill one page in a letter, I will write you one;” “it is not much of a Main Street but it is growing . . . we have a fine up to date dry goods and grocery store combine started last fall. . . we have 2 older grocery stores, a gents furnishings store, hardware, harness shop, bakery, 2 barber shops, 2 hotels, and no saloons.”

The Hattie Weber Museum of Davis is open 10 to 4 on Wednesdays and Saturday’s. The postcard show will be on display at least through the summer. We thank Jan and Carroll Cross for responding so promptly to our “brainstorm” request for them to loan cards for this exhibit.