Greetings From a Dam

You may, at some point, find yourself in an antique store or junk shop flipping your way through a seemingly endless stack of postcards. It happened to me recently, and though it may not have been the highlight of my weekend, it did open my eyes to a clear trend in early 20th Century postcardery: dams. The postcards (and postcard senders) of yore really had a thing for dams.

"It's amazing how much variety there is compared to what we think of today as postcards," says D.C. Jackson, a dam historian, civil engineer and professor of history at Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvannia. "A hundred years ago, for every little town, you can find local views of every little store and the fire engine house and the civil war memorial and scenes along the river. And dams are a part of that record."