SEARSPORT, Maine — The humble postcard is having a moment.
This year marks the 100th anniversary of Maine Postcard Day, a little-known holiday proclaimed by Gov. Oakley Curtis in April 1916 as an early bid to promote tourism.
“It is a patriotic duty to proclaim Maine’s charms and make known to the nation that her people are ready and eager to extend [her] hospitality,” the then-governor wrote in his proclamation, which asked all Mainers to send a picture postcard to their friends outside the state.
And while it may be impossible to gauge the success of the postcard campaign for tourism, it is definitely possible to learn a lot about the state in the early days of the 20th century through the lens of the small, ubiquitous cards. That’s why the Penobscot Marine Museum in Searsport’s summer exhibit, which opens to the public this weekend and features a century of postcards and other images from the state, is called “Wish You Were Here: Communicating Maine.”
And it’s why a documentary filmmaker from Wiscasset is finishing a major project this summer about Eastern Illustrating and Publishing Co., an early 20th century postcard company based in Belfast that tried to document all the cities and towns in Maine and New England.
Filmmaker and musician Sumner McKane, best known for his 2010 project about logging called “In the Blood,” said that when he first learned of the thousands of glass plate negatives from Eastern Illustrating that are part of the museum’s collection, he was underwhelmed.
“To be honest, I figured it would be dull,” he said this week. “I didn’t know anything about postcards. I’m picturing images of hotels and sculptures. But once I got into the collection, I couldn’t believe it. It’s absolutely amazing. You can type in any small town in the northeast and pictures will come up. Towns that don’t exist anymore, tiny little towns. And they’re beautiful images.”
According to Kevin Johnson, the museum’s photo archivist, the Eastern Illustrating postcards are nothing like the postcards you can buy today at any drugstore. Back then, the company sent a fleet of photographers all over Maine and the northeast in Model Ts to shoot photos of anything and everything and sell as many postcards as they could to the people they met.
“They didn’t set out to preserve the way that New England looked at the beginning of the 20th century,” Johnson said. “They were just out to make a buck. But they did it in such a thorough way they left this legacy behind.”
Instead of snapping pretty pictures of sunsets or sailboats, the photographers — mostly men — immortalized anything that caught their fancy. Graveyards, working harbors, a family posing outside their house on Main Street in Eagle Lake. A butter factory in East Corinth, Machias’ bustling turn-of-the century downtown, a serious line of counselors at Blue Mountain Camp in Weld. One notable postcard of the picturesque Stonington waterfront appears to show a small boy taking aim at the photographer with a rifle.
McKane, who will combine the black-and-white images from the collection with oral histories of Prohibition, smuggling, rum-running and other events that helped to shape the area back then, is still raising funds to finish “The Northeast by Eastern.” He’s hoping to have it finished this summer, but before it’s done, he needs to hit the road like those photographers of yore and travel to Vermont, Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Maine to collect more oral histories.
“It’s taking all my time and resources, but I’m having fun,” the filmmaker said. “What I’m trying to do with the film is tell the story of the rural northeast in the early decades of the 20th century. Within the images, there’s a bigger story.”