Postcards offering the sentiment “wish you were here” have been a staple of summer travel. They have also served to carry back memories, replacing or adding to photographs taken.
Most of the postcards in the Archives are images of the college and town. We’ve put them online to supplement our photograph collection. But there are other postcards hidden in manuscript collections, particularly student scrapbooks.
While these scrapbooks usually have a few postcards of college scenes, they often will have a set of pages in the back with memento postcards – cards that the students did not receive from friends or intend to mail but rather to mark trips taken.
A scenic view of North Carolina mountains, look closely for the hikers.
Daniel Gibson Wilson, class of 1926 came to Davidson from Atlanta. His postcard set included two different groups. The images were either of patriotic scenes (signing of the Declaration of Independence) and Washington, DC or they were from the mountains of North Carolina and beaches and towns of South Carolina.
Daniel Wilson kept this postcard from Charleston, SC.
A tunnel in the Blue Ridge
A scene from Washington, DC
Aubrey Neblett Brown, class of 1929, traveled farther afield with a dozen or so postcards of New Orleans and Tennessee. He also had one postcard from his hometown of Mineral Wells, TX.
New Orleans street scene collected by Aubrey Brown
A Tulane postcard to go along with the Davidson postcards of the era
A scene from Brown’s home town of Mineral Wells
