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    Pittsfield
    Pittsfield
    Pittsfield
    Ebook186 pages55 minutes

    Pittsfield

    By The Berkshire County Historical Society

    ()

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    About this ebook

    Pittsfield is the center of Berkshire County, Massachusetts. For centuries, visitors have traveled trails, railroads, and highways across the Berkshire Hills of western Massachusetts to enjoy the serene beauty of Pontoosuc and Onota Lakes, shop on bustling North Street, or stay at a fine hotel. Many more moved here from across the country and around the world to work at Pittsfield's farms and factories. Since the early 19th century, Pittsfield has been host to woolen mills and General Electric's factories, hotels and motels, hospitals and schools, and much more. Cultural sites, such as Arrowhead, where Herman Melville wrote Moby-Dick, and Park Square, the location of the first agricultural fair ever held in the United States, continue to attract visitors to the city.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArcadia Publishing
    Release dateApr 18, 2016
    ISBN9781439655931
    Pittsfield
    Author

    The Berkshire County Historical Society

    The Berkshire County Historical Society has compiled these exciting images dating from 1760 to 1950 from their own extensive collection. The society hopes that residents and visitors alike will enjoy this unique history.

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      Book preview

      Pittsfield - The Berkshire County Historical Society

      here.

      INTRODUCTION

      Pittsfield has long been the home of innovation. From its earliest days as Pontoosuck Plantation (incorporating a Mohican word meaning haunt of the winter deer) through today, this region has inspired invention and creativity, bringing forth an amazing array of new ideas and products. Pittsfield innovators used Merino wool to create American broadcloth, which clothed soldiers and society ladies alike. William Stanley’s invention of electrical transformers attracted General Electric to Pittsfield, and the company later expanded into plastics, including the invention of Lexan. Gordon McKay, of Pittsfield, invented a sewing machine to attach soles to leather shoes, fostering more industry.

      It was not all industry. Berkshire County, with its natural beauty, attracted authors such as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Herman Melville. Throw into the mix a thousand other strands of creativity, innovation, hard work, and recreation, and an image emerges of a vital and interesting small city. This book contains glimpses of this history, seen in the ever-evolving medium of postcards.

      Postcards were an innovation in communication in the 1840s, when notecards were mailed in pictorial envelopes. The world’s oldest postcard was sent in 1840 to the writer Theodore Hook of London, England. The next innovation developed during the American Civil War, when drawings, paintings, and photographs were printed on one side of hard cardstock and the other side left for a message, although many people wrote over the images, obscuring them. On February 27, 1861, Congress passed an act that allowed privately printed cards, weighing one ounce or under, to be sent in the mail. That same year, John P. Charlton copyrighted the first postcard in America.

      In 1870, Hymen L. Lipman began reissuing Charlton’s postcard under a new name: Lipman’s Postal Cards. The first government-produced postcard was issued on May 1, 1873. By law, the government postcards were the only postcards allowed to bear the term postal card. Private publishers were allowed to print postcards, but they were more expensive to mail (2¢ instead of 1¢ for the government-issued cards).

      A few years later, American publishers were allowed to print and sell cards bearing the inscription, Private Mailing Card, Authorized by Act of Congress on May 19, 1898. These private mailing cards could be sent with 1¢ stamps, making this the most significant event to enhance the use of private postal cards. Messages were not allowed on the address side of the private mailing cards, as indicated by the words This side is exclusively for the Address. If the front had an image, then a small space was left for a message.

      An international postal agreement in 1907 led to a major change in the design of postcards. Cards could have messages on the left half of the address side, meaning the entire reverse side could have an image. This change ushered in the divided back period (1907–1915), also known as the Golden Age of Postcards due to the vast popularity of postcards during this time period.

      Another type of postcard that began to be produced and popularly used during the divided back period and through the white border period is the real-photo postcard. Real-photo postcards were first produced using the Kodak postcard camera. The postcard camera took a photograph and then printed a postcard-size negative of the image, complete with a divided back and place for postage. In chapter 9, the postcards produced by Pittsfield native Matthew H. Powell (1869–1922) fall into this category.

      Most of the privately published pictorial cards sold in America were produced in Germany, where companies perfected the color lithograph process. But in Pittsfield, two companies offered to create cards privately for anyone who wished to supply personal photographs. The 1908 Pittsfield City Directory includes Manning’s Photography Studio as a potential supplier and Eagle Printing and Binding as another. A series of baseball-oriented cards was created by the innovative local photographer Matthew Powell, who used early wide-angle lenses.

      With the beginning of World War I, trade with Germany ceased, and American printers supplied most of the postcards in the United States. Since they did not have the same sophisticated technology as German printers, the quality of the cards fell, effectively ending the golden age. Also, printers saved ink during this time by not printing to the edge of the card, leaving a white border around the image. Postcards from the so-called white border period also had a description of the image on the message side, which retained the divided back.

      Beginning in the 1930s, new printing processes allowed printers to produce postcards with high rag content, which gave them the appearance of being printed on linen, rather than paper. The most notable printer of this period was Curt Teich & Co. of Chicago, Illinois, which printed its first linen card in 1931 and whose postcards became popular around the world. Teich’s process allowed for quicker production and brighter dyes to be used to color the images. Most postcards retained the white border, though some were printed to the edge of the card. The back remained divided and usually contained printed information about the image.

      The production of linen postcards eventually gave way to photochrome postcards, a color-printing process that closely resemble photographs. However, linen cards continued to be produced for over a decade after the advent of photochrome postcards.

      Modern photochrome-style postcards first appeared in 1939, when the Union Oil Company began to sell them in their western service stations. Production of the postcards slowed during World War II because of supply shortages, but after the war, they dominated the market. In the 1990s, the advent of e-cards and e-mail started the decline of the postcard’s popularity. Today, postcards

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