Article by J.. Patrick Boyer

The simple little postcard is, as it has always been, a vault of social, cultural, and technological information. Though exemplifying eras back to the 1800s, they are still being printed, retailed, and purchased to send to others or keep as souvenir images of places visited. Professional photography is better than one’s phone camera generally captures, but there’s far more to Muskoka’s postcard culture than that. 

A series of five postcards from William Anderson’s Muskoka Series, reproductions of his famous picture postcards that retailed two-for-a-nickel a century ago, are available at the Muskoka Lakes Library in Port Carling for $1.50 each.

“They are selling well,” reports head librarian Andrew Whitfield, a clue about Muskoka’s enduring postcard culture. Across the district contemporary postcards in display racks at marinas, gift shops, summer resorts, cultural centres and heritage attractions remain popular because they meet an authentic demand. Selfies have displaced postcards but cannot replace them.

Postcard culture arose when human desire to keep in touch with others and peoples’ fascination with images attended the marriage of new technologies in photography and printing during the season that mail services came of age. Because Muskoka’s holidaying economy took off at the very same time, the district offers a unique microcosm of this phenomenon. Postcards made an outsized contribution to Muskoka’s fame, fueled the district’s tourist business, and shaped Muskokans’ own identifiable sense of place.

Though most forms of personal communication have now migrated from paper into cyberspace, the linear progression through time should not be overlooked because postcards evolved with applied science and continuity. For instance, the concept of a postcard traces back before photography to its precursors, small cards printed with wood cuts and delivered by hand, and envelopes lithographed with pictures on them. Fast forward to digital messages restricted to 160 characters, effectively continuing the brevity imposed on postcard writers to confine their message to the allotted space at the left side on the back.

Mailed cards with printed images began in continental Europe because Germans were the world’s best printers and the French were ever advancing photography. In a separate play, Britain helpfully overhauled its antiquated postal system. The sender, not the recipient, would now pay the mailing cost. Variable postage rates based on multiple factors were changed to flat fees: 1¢ in country, 2¢ for overseas. These changes mattered because Britain’s system applied in colonial Canada.

In 1840, efficiency accelerated when England printed the world’s first adhesive stamps in sheets to sell at post offices. A postcard’s stamp (like a letter’s) was “cancelled” by an inked handstamp imprinting over the postage stamp the place of mailing and date, proof of prepaid delivery and bar to saving a cent or two by reuse of the same stamp. Rules governing the card’s verso for recipient’s address and sender’s message evolved through many permutations into what we know today.

Why Muskoka best exemplifies postcard culture at its zenith are the same reasons the district sprouted a vacation economy: southernmost exposure of the most scenic parts of the ancient Canadian Shield, close proximity to large urban populations, and speedy convenience of Steam Age travel by train and ship. The added ingredient was early presence of the district’s paparazzi, freelance professional photographers pursuing a celebrity to get stunning photographs. The celebrity was Muskoka’s mystique, which they largely created through photography.

Muskoka enjoyed considerable bench strength for postcard production. The district’s frontline cameramen owned and operated stores selling cameras, film, picture frames, developing and printing customer’s films. They supplemented income by photographing babies, weddings and graduations for families, public events for the weeklies and scenic or memorable places around the district to publish their own lines of postcards. To create postcards on a par with those elsewhere in Canada, nothing more was needed.

However, Muskoka being Muskoka, full time dedicated professional photographers of great artistic skill at the cutting edge of camerawork techniques also felt challenged by the opportunity to make money by capturing scenes, places, people, and especially the district’s elusive appeal. In the tournament of postcard production, Muskoka had an extra line of players.

In 1907 William Anderson, who’d taken up photography in England, was 27 when he arrived in Muskoka, became mesmerized, and stayed to take pictures. Finding Lake Muskoka’s Beaumaris community and its twin pillars, brothers-in-law Edward Prouse and John Willmott who owned and operated the hotel and general store, Anderson set up his photography business in Prouse’s hotel and married Willmott’s daughter Frances. These career moves, combined with Beaumaris being ground zero of Millionaires’ Row where American plutocrats summered and were always doing picture-worthy things, would have put a lazy man on Easy Street.

Anderson, not lazy in any way, travelled the district’s waterways, scouting dramatic scenery and, like a stage director, arranging people and props to add the all-important human dimension to nature’s panorama. The result was the “Anderson Series” of sepia toned and colourized picture postcards that became the rage to mail and keep. In the Roaring Twenties, Anderson upped his game in this competitive field where legendary Frank Micklethwaite, official photographer for the city of Toronto was just as busily operating, as were other prominent photographers, each publishing their own series of Muskoka postcards. Numerous Canadian and American postcard companies were simultaneously printing and distributing Muskoka postcards using whatever photos they could get, from train wrecks to burned out settlements, sprawling leather tanneries that turned waterways pink or brown, and log-jammed rivers barring navigation to settlers and vacationers.

Major players like Anderson and Micklethwaite paid the best printers overseas in Germany or Britain to produce postcards using the costly but durable Toronto-made copper engravings of their photographs, mounted on teakwood blocks, which they shipped to the printers. Back came thousands of cards printed on quality lightweight card with the best of inks. General stores, gift shops, gas stations, post offices, resorts and hotels throughout Muskoka bought “Anderson’s Lake of Bays Series” and “Anderson’s Muskoka Series” because sales boomed with his stellar images of the district’s inland waters.

Each spring, as his son Everritt Anderson described, William made sales trips by boat to lakeside communities, scooping big orders the Anderson children helped assemble and ship to customers aboard steamships with mail contracts calling in at Beaumaris. Over his lifetime, Anderson created 250 distinctive Muskoka postcards. In the 1920s, he went aloft with Billy Bishop, World War I flying ace who began Canada’s first civil aviation company with scheduled flights, to capture novel aerial photographs of Muskoka. Decades before Photoshop, Anderson also gained a commercial edge by inserting boats into lake scenes when a postcard photograph needed them, understanding that people benefit from human presence in images to grasp the scale of the scene and identify with it.

The hard-work adventure was the same for Frank Micklethwaite lugging heavy glass plates, cameras and tripod through Muskoka’s harsh and lovely terrain to capture memorable photographs. Railway companies with ownership interests in major summer resorts like the Royal Muskoka on Lake Rosseau and the WaWa on Lake of Bays used Micklethwaite images to promote vacationing. They also boosted fares aboard their passenger trains and with paying guests in the resorts by producing large posters and flooding their stations with their own postcards, effectively acting as Muskoka’s public relations department. 

Micklethwaite’s dramatically appealing images, extensively reproduced in magazines and books at the time and ever since, established the face of Muskoka to the world, in tandem with the photographs of others such as William Anderson with his series and professional photographer O.F. Adams, who called his series of postcards “Muskoka Views.” Others with extensive postcard series included Henry Fry of Gravenhurst and business partners Ed Thatcher and Barry Wenger who expanded their busy studio from Bracebridge to Utterson.

Postcard culture includes interpreting these remarkable artifacts, which three Muskokans have done in book form. The 1980s book Postcard Memories of Muskoka, showing 119 images of the district’s inland lakes with steamboats and summer resorts in various combinations celebrates Muskoka steamers in their grand era. “Canadians are getting much pleasure these days looking back at their past,” wrote Allan Anderson. “This book is a glimpse of a small segment of that past, yet offers a most comprehensive social history of Canada in the early 20th century.”

A decade later, Bruce McCraw’s 1998 book, Postcard Memories of Sparrow Lake, presented 144 cards to illustrate his narrative. Its publisher Barry Penhale, head of Natural Heritage Books and respected authority on Ontario history, used a large trim size (8 by 10 inches) for McCraw’s 138-page book, reproducing two or even three postcards per page. Postcard Memories has a map of Skeleton Lake identifying its many resorts and locales, is indexed, and includes his specific notes on the postcards. McGraw received great encouragement from Penhale to publicly share his “postcard memories” and illuminate postcard culture.

“They document how resorts evolved from tent or simple cabin with no heat or running water to today’s modern unit, how holiday travel by train gave way to the automobile, how transport to the lodge from Port Stanton by motor launch replaced the steamer, and how recreation on water evolved from skiff and canoe to the outboard motor.”

McCraw also observed “postcards were the only inexpensive and fast way for tourists to keep in touch with family and friends, for years costing no more than one or two cents to mail. Usually a short note to the recipient told of a safe arrival or some other event.”

Postcards travelled quickly from the local post office, often received the same day and if traveling long distances, in less than three days. “The quick dispatch of mail was assisted by railway mail cars on passenger trains and sometimes on separate mail-trains between major centers,” noted McCraw. “The mail baggage cars frequently had letter slots so the sender in a village or small town could deposit mail directly when a train made a station stop. The extensive rail network and frequent train service combined for rapid mail transport, well suited to the simple format of the postcard.”

The postcards McCraw collected had been printed for resorts just when lithography and colouring entered a more elegant stage. “Frequently tinted with Art Nouveau ornamentation, some were bordered with a frame to make them look like a photograph of a picture. It wasn’t long before the novelty card appeared, showing oversized fish caught in Sparrow Lake.”

As to postcard culture, McCraw observed “Some showed clear evidence of being removed from albums. By no means were they only sent to Ontario or Canadian addresses. So many were mailed to friends and relatives as far away as California, England, and Belgium, all to end up back in Ontario in the hands of postcard dealers.”

Bruce MacLellan’s two books on Lake of Bay’s postcards continue this genre of district historiography entwining an extensive array of images with stories about the places and people shown. Savvy about presentation and marketing and about Lake of Bays as a long-serving leader of Lake of Bays Heritage Foundation, MacLellan shares more than 300 postcards in these artfully produced small books. Nodding to the reality that most show a scene horizontally rather than vertically, they are arranged, one per page, on coated stock of five by nine inches, simulating holding the very postcard itself, with space enough for him to identify the scene, add background information, and provide helpful interpretation.

MacLellan researched the context of postcards for the first book, published in 2007 as Post Cards from Lake of Bays. “Even in 1915,” he found, with a world war underway, tourism slumping, and Canada’s population less than eight million, “people mailed over 65 million post cards.” Particularly adept at reading clues and connecting dots, MacLellan described period details in the postcard scenes. “The images on the cards and the accompanying messages people wrote,” he added about postcard culture, “offer historic insights into local development, transportation, tourism, fashion, commerce, technology, war, and human emotions.” So popular was his first book he followed up three years later with a sequel, more postcards from his extensive collection, in Back Again at Lake of Bays.

Current interest in postcards, a vital component in postcard culture, includes hobbyists collecting and trading them; researchers discovering them as an exceptional heritage resource for high quality images of times and places not otherwise available; and, for most anyone, the mildly prurient enjoyment of reading other people’s mail.

Devotees of this artform have clubs and associations to share information and provide a marketplace to buy and sell. Postcard collectors (deltiologists) have a more portable and easily handled trove of assets than numismatists with their coin collections or philatelists with their stamps, so are more comparable to baseball and hockey trading-card enthusiasts.

Of course, the internet provides a global marketplace and forum for postcard research. Vintage Muskoka, an online community with 15,000 members, continuously posts images and info, including at Easter this year a 1909 Bala postcard printed in Britain and published by J.W. Burgess, the community’s mainstay. Its July 9 message to a Toronto recipient on Bay Street was a news digest of family ailments and movements here and there, like a phone call in the pre-telephone era.

Seasonal Muskokan John Gall, whose family’s deep district roots run back to the Grunwald Lodge on Mary Lake, has more than 300 postcards in his collection. Active in the Toronto Postcard Club (the nearest club for Muskokans), he is skilled at evaluating cards and adept at finding an ideal postcard image online to illustrate some feature of times past, such as a blacksmith’s shop.

The research component of postcard culture engages heritage curators at Muskoka’s museums and public libraries having postcards holdings. Mary Storey of Gravenhurst, voluntarily headed up development of the Muskoka Discovery Centre’s archives for the past two decades. She is closely familiar with the museum’s postcard collection that grew from a worthy handful in the original museum beside the Muskoka Steamships ticket office, to more than 600 postcards today. The expansion of the collection is the result of successive donations, most recently in some 20 organized and labelled binders contributed by retired steamboat captain Ron Sclater.

Sara White, curator of Muskoka Heritage Place in Huntsville, constantly fielding requests for pictures of people, places, or events, is adept at tapping the museum’s photograph and postcard holdings for such images. At Muskoka Lakes Museum in Port Carling the collection runs upwards of 300 postcards, some with correspondence, some without, a variety of black-and-white, tinted, colourized and full-colour chrome postcards. General manager Rachael Thiessen is spearheading a digital catalogue upgrade of these postcards to improve research capacity for museum staff and internet accessibility for the general public.

The Gravenhurst Archives currently have 2,062 postcards, the earliest dating from 1904. Archivist and historian Judy Humphries conducts the town’s archival operations with volunteers, including Jack Cline, digitizing images since 2003. In addition to researching images for authors to illustrate their books and articles, Humphries shares her own knowledge through popular history talks illustrated on-screen with postcards, press clippings and photos.

District libraries with Muskoka Collections have various postcard holdings. At Bracebridge, information services librarian Cindy Buhne reports some 300 postcards in the collection, most of them donated and in binders with an index, awaiting further organization and cataloging. In Port Carling, chief librarian Andrew Whitfield is currently undertaking a major evaluation of archival holdings, including photos and postcards. They, too, are retained as the collections were donated, including the extensive Applegath records on the Muskoka Chautauqua Assembly. In addition to digitizing records to make them more accessible to staff and the public alike, he is also focused on developing clearer rules for archival retention.

Through the 20th century postcards by the millions flew out of Muskoka to friends and family across North America and overseas. The scale of this self-reinforcing publicity bore testament to the district’s postcard culture and spreading fame.

In the mid-1950s Santa’s Village at Bracebridge began selling coloured postcards as souvenirs. Muskoka resorts and gift shops sold countless scenic cards as mementoes of their vacation or that guests keenly mailed to others showing the glorious place they were staying, boosting Muskoka tourism by hastily writing, “Having a great time. Wish you were here!”