Postcards Views of Davidson and North Carolina

A recent email sharing a Davidson postcard reminded me that this would be a good time to highlight our online postcard collection and also share a few postcards hidden in our manuscript collections.  The only problem is just picking out a few. After looking through our collections and in light of our new exhibit for the postcards in the Nash Collection, the easiest choice was to go with North & South Carolina scenes.

We have almost 200 postcards of the college and town (and a few outlying places) in our online Postcard Collection. The oldest dates from 1898 and shows the front campus with the original Chambers building in the background.

The most recent date from 2003 and are of the Knobloch Campus Center and a montage of campus buildings.

The oldest town postcard dates from around 1907 and shows Main Street looking south from the edge of the campus.

 

Included in the online collection are a few images from alumni travels to China and Egypt and a set of cards from Chicago found in an 1912 yearbook. To see those, you’ll need to search the database.

The images below are from scrapbooks from two members of the class of 1926, Benjamin Ratchford (Manuscript collection DC024)  and David G. Wilson (Manuscript collection DC0245s).

Benjamin Ulysses Ratchford, a native of Gastonia, North Carolina, was a class valedictorian in high school. He was an economics major at Davidson College. He received his M.A. in economics from Duke University in 1927 and in 1932 earned the first Ph.D. awarded by Duke in economics. He remained on the faculty at Duke until 1960, and spent time in Europe after World War II, studying and reporting on the economy. He received the Medal of Freedom, given by the War Department to civilians who performed meritorious service in the war, for his work in Berlin. Ratchford left Duke University in 1960 to head the research department at the Federal Reserve Bank in Richmond, until his retirement in 1967.

David Gibson Wilson came to Davidson College from Atlanta, Georgia. As a student at Davidson College, Wilson was chairman of the Junior Speaking Committee. He was vice-president of the Senior class, president of the Glee club, and adjutant of the R.O.T.C. Battalion. He also was a member of the Phi Gamma Delta Fraternity and was elected to Omicron Delta Kappa.

Both men kept scrapbooks as students and included several pages of postcards. Most were never mailed but kept as souvenirs of their travels. Beaches and mountains, especially around Montreat, were popular in the 1920 as they are now, but the views are a bit different.  Researchers and postcard enthusiasts are welcome to visit Archives & Special Collections to see all the postcards in the scrapbooks.