This post considers what a postcard depicting a photograph of a natural disaster, specifically flooding in March, 1936, might suggest about why such an event was so widely captured on postcards. Although the subject of this postcard is certainly part of natural history, I'll admit the blog post may be a real outlier, even for this blog.
Several years ago, I acquired a shoebox of postcards that my wife's aunt accumulated over the years, most of them unused and mementos of the many places around the world that she'd visited. A few, like the one shown below, were personal, from family and friends.
This card was sent by her father (my wife's grandfather) in 1936 when she was a university student in Chicago. The photograph on the front shows a flooded road in the foreground, with buildings in the middle ground separated by a road running between them. Large chunks of ice are at the flood's edge. This road slopes upward toward the bridge in the background. That there's a body of water nearby is clear from the flooding and the bridge. Before being printed, the photograph was annotated by hand with the following:
BELLEVILLE FLOOD
1936
BRIDGE ST. WEST
Belleville is in Ontario, Canada, located on the edge of the Bay of Quinte on the northeastern shoreline of Lake Ontario. The city, straddling the Moira River which feeds into the Bay, is almost due north from Rochester, New York, across Lake Ontario. The bridge in the background of the photograph on the card spans the Moira River.
The message on the reverse side of the card reads:
Glad you got along OK with [?]. I leave tonight for Quebec[,] then to PE Island & Nova Scotia. Lots of snow & slush here. Streets and roads terrible. Love, Daddy
The card is postmarked March 20, 1936, at 9:30 a.m., in North Bay, Ontario. The writer, an executive with a multi-national corporation who lived with his family in Brandon, Manitoba, was, I assume, on a business trip, given both the itinerary described in the message and the fact that North Bay, Ontario, where the card was postmarked, is over 1,200 miles from Brandon. North Bay is some 244 miles from Belleville.
The flooding in Belleville was but one episode in a massive natural disaster that unfolded during March across much of the eastern United States and parts of eastern Canada. Even in this day and age when devastating climate-related natural disasters are becoming commonplace, the breadth of this flooding and its attendant destruction are breathtaking.
The genesis of the widespread flooding in the U.S. and Canada was a relentlessly cold winter that endured through February, marked by heavy snow, particularly at higher elevations. Then, in early March, temperatures climbed markedly, accompanied by persistent, heavy rain. (The meteorological patterns of the period are described succinctly in The Floods of March, 1936, Part 1, New England Rivers, U.S. Geological Survey, a multi-volume analysis of the 1936 floods, 1937.) The combination of warm temperatures and rain led ice-choked rivers to rise above flood level, sending deep water and often massive chunks of ice into villages, towns, and cities. Buildings were battered, bridges swept away, and dams surmounted. Lives were lost. The timing of the flooding in March varied somewhat from place to place and there were often multiple phases of the flooding in the some places.
The flooding of Belleville shown on the postcard began on March 12th. The Moira River overflowed its banks sending surging water and massive ice floes into Belleville, inundating streets, businesses, and homes. Chunks of ices tore into brick buildings. The flooding lasted for several days. Insult was added to injury when, on March 19, parts of the city flooded again because an upstream dam couldn't hold back an ice field. (Accounts of the flooding can be found in stories that were published in The Ontario Intelligencer newspaper (published in Belleville) during the period in question. The March, 1936, run of the paper is contained in a volume available on the Internet Archive.)
The Community Archives of Belleville and Hastings County offers some striking images of the flooding. The photograph below shows the ice field on the Moira and was taken from the bridge in the background of the image above.
Frank Benson, a Belleville resident, possessed this photograph and four others showing different aspects of the flood. They were donated to the Community Archives by his daughter after his death.
I am intrigued by the fact that, among these five images of the 1936 flood that Benson owned, is one very similar to the photograph on the front of my postcard. His version was printed on paper with a narrow fancy border, in contrast to the wide white border on my card. As a result, the image on mine is slightly cropped. His does not include the handwritten annotation that mine does. Benson wrote on the back of each of his photographs, describing the scene and location. On the back of the photograph of the flooding on Bridge Street West, he wrote: "View of the 'Lower Bridge' over the Moira River[.] (This is the way I drive to work usually. Needless to say I had to Detour.)"
Though none of the five Benson photographs is a postcard (they do not have postcard backings), clearly images of this flooding were turned into picture postcards. My card is evidence of that. Further, the Community Archives reports that it has ten flood image postcards. That led me to wonder how common it was to show natural disasters on postcards. The short answer is: quite common. A very crude measure of the significant production of postcards depicting just the March, 1936, floods in the United States is suggested by the results of an eBay search for "1936 flood postcard." This search generated over 600 hits (on September 24, 2024). Nearly all of these cards do in fact show flood scenes from the March floods in the U.S. I have not analyzed the cards with any rigor and acknowledge the limitations of this count, among them the inclusion of a very small number of cards unrelated to the 1936 flooding, and an apparently modest number of cards with duplicate images.
These March, 1936, postcards constitute just a small subset of disaster postcards writ large as evidenced by the over 40,000 hits for a search on eBay for "disaster postcards." Admittedly, some unknown number of the postcards caught by these search terms do not show a natural disaster or even a disaster at all. Further research on the topic reveals that images of natural disasters on postcards have a long history, well predating the 1936 floods, going back to the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Two researchers have written regarding topics covered by these cards:
Floods, tornadoes, blizzards, earthquakes, fires, wrecks, and explosions - all forms of natural and human-made catastrophes were of special interest to postcard photographers and are in local view collectors' albums. Shooting the events, or more often their aftermaths, was an opportunity to make an extra buck. Local photographers were right there to catch the moment whenever possible. They would quickly process their film and have cards to sell shortly afterward. (Robert Bogdan and Todd Weseloh, Real Photo Postcard Guide: The People's Photography, 2006, p. 127.)
Bogdan and Weseloh are particularly focused on real photo postcards (RPPCs), a subset of picture postcards. The postcard that precipitated this post is an RPPC. These postcards were actual photographs printed on photographic paper with a postcard backing. They were not the product of large printing operations that made plates or screens from photographs and printed cards in the thousands. Instead, in creating RPPCs, the photographers, both professional and very often amateur, usually "developed the film themselves and then printed photos from the negative onto photographic paper." (Bogdan and Weseloh, p. 9.) These were incredibly popular into the 1930s and many individual views were produced, typically showing scenes of local interest.
A word of caution: Though many of the analyses read for this post and discussed here are specific to the United States, I make the assumption that the Canadian experience with picture postcards was generally similar. The history of the evolution of postcards in both countries is not all that dissimilar. For a brief overview of the history of postcards worldwide, see Postcard History and Eras (VintagePostcards.ca). The U.S. history is succinctly summarized at Greetings From the Smithsonian: A Postcard History (Smithsonian Institution Archives); the Canadian history of both government-issued and private postcards is covered extensively in Postal History and Usages of the Canada Post Card: 1871-1928 (British North American Philatelic Society).
The production of disaster postcards partly reflects the general role that the picture postcard came to play in the period. In the U.S., postcards were created in the middle of the 19th century as a cheap means of communication. Pictures were added at some juncture in the 1860s or 1870s. Different researchers identify the heyday of the picture postcard slightly differently, but it would appear to largely fall across the very end of the 19th century into the first couple of decades of the 20th century. The popularity of the RPPC extended somewhat beyond that. At the time, the use of photographs in newspapers was not ubiquitous, and was particularly absent in small towns. Some analysts posit that picture postcards filled the void. These postcards provided "an incredibly inexpensive and convenient way to capture people, places, and events." (Fred Basset, Wish You Were Here!: The Story of the Golden Age of Picture Postcards in the United States, New York State Library.) In the U.S. and internationally, those "events" particularly included natural disasters.
Not surprising, a profit motive prompted photographers and printers to generate disaster postcards to respond to the demand for such items. People were drawn to these cards; as one set of researchers has posited, the overarching function of such cards "was to let people have vicarious experiences." (Larissa Casteliani Marinho Falcao, et al., Why Were Disasters Portrayed in Postcards?: Disaster Media in the Early 20th Century, International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction, Volume 108, 2024.) (This paper suffers from what I believe to be a poor job of translation from its original language.) Many people purchased picture postcards not to send (more than half of those produced were never used), but to collect, and show and exchange with family and friends. As a result, "postcards were a nexus of social relation and intimacy." (Bogdan and Weseloh, p. 2.) In some instances, the proliferation of disaster postcards to a broad audience could have the effect, intended or not, of drawing attention and aid to the affected localities.
By the fourth decade of the 20th century when postcards, including RPPCs, showing scenes of the March, 1936, flooding were produced, were these historical motivations still in play?
My card speaks somewhat to that. One might be surprised that the date of the postmark on the card - March 20, 1936 - is just eight days from the onset of the flooding in Belleville. In that brief time span, a commercial product came to market and my wife's grandfather purchased a copy. Such a quick turnaround was certainly possible for RPPCs and, in this instance, presumably reflected the desire of the photographer to capitalize financially on local interest in the event. Overall, I surmise that this same motivation applies to the productions of the many picture postcards of the 1936 flood. The profit motive was alive and well.
It's interesting that my wife's grandfather sent this card from North Bay, Ontario. Did he purchase it there, over 240 miles from Belleville? If so, then this real photo postcard was for sale well beyond the local environs of Belleville, suggesting that whoever produced the card thought the market for such views was fairly broad.
It's a minor thing, but I'm intrigued by the question of who took this photograph. As already noted, Frank Benson owned five photographs of the flood, one of which was the same as that on my card with some key differences as described above. Was he the photographer and, perhaps, did he create my RPPC? Or, might he have acquired the photographs from the photographer, who remains unknown? The archivist at the Community Archives noted that it's unclear whether Benson took these photos, and suggested the chances are greater that a local professional photographer was responsible. She added that they could be the work of a local amateur. (Personal communication.)
As my reading of the March issues of The Ontario Intelligencer made clear, the newspapers of the day clearly had the capacity to include photographs of unfolding events. The flooding in Belleville was no exception. So, a previous incentive to produce disaster postcards - bring photographic images of events to a local population that had no other access to them - no longer applied.
The seemingly irresistible draw of disaster images was undoubtedly still in force, even as it is today. These are scenes, however disturbing, from which most of us cannot turn away. Further, as with the Belleville RPPC, they could show local residents scenes with which they were very familiar, but transformed by the disaster. That may well have heightened their allure. I initially thought that people who had gone through the trauma of such a flooding disaster would have little desire to revisit the experience, even if just through photographs. But, clearly, I was wrong about that. This really came home to me when I researched a card featuring a photograph of the March, 1936, flooding in Amesbury, Massachusetts. Just over a month after the town was flooded, residents gathered at a local church for a "Flood-night program" - complete with more than 50 still photos and 2 home movies of the Amesbury disaster, and 5 reels of film from the State Board of Health showing the flooding that had occurred generally on the Merrimack and Connecticut Rivers. It would seem that, though they had suffered through it, these local residents still found the images of the flooding compelling. (This is recounted in The Merrimac River Flood of 1936, A Contemporary Account by a Point Shore Resident, undated typewritten manuscript, Amesbury Public Library Digital Repository.)
It's worth considering why my wife's grandfather purchased and sent this particular card. The answer isn't clear. Though, in general, personal connections to the scene of a disaster card helped drive sales, it can be ruled out in this instance with some certainty. As far as I know the family had no link to Belleville and wasn't directly affected by the flooding there. The collecting impulse which generated so much of the production of such cards, also was not at work. Though my wife's aunt, who received the card in the mail, did add it to her collection, this disaster postcard was a one-off. Possibly her father found the card's image interesting, or he wanted a card with a provincial scene on it.
In fact, I think that the choice of this card was probably purely random; the card may simply have been what was readily available to the sender. Apropos of this, I particularly like one message on a picture postcard depicting the 1936 flooding in Hallowell, Maine. It begins: "Dear Pop, There don't seem to be any postcards left except flood scenes. I don't know whether we go through Hallowell or not, but I think it's down near Augusta."
Basically, then, my RPPC may have fulfilled a postcard's typical, intended function: cheap and quick communication. The photograph of a natural disaster, in this case, being of only passing interest.
Posts
