MONTAGUE — It was 1941, and the 9-year-old, 740-foot French King Bridge between Erving and Gill was something to see — magnificent enough that some travelers from New York went searching for a postcard with a photo of the bridge to send to friends back home.
“We are having a wonderful trip. Beautiful scenery — we saw this bridge yesterday. Home soon,” wrote “G.R.” on the back of a postcard sent to Mrs. Wells Ingerson of Apulia Station, N.Y.
The postcard from “G.R.” is one of many at the Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association’s exhibit, “The Time of My Life,” which opened Saturday at the Great Falls Discovery Center on Avenue A in Turners Falls. Named after the message a young woman, Bernice, wrote to her mother on a postcard while traveling through western Massachusetts, the exhibit showcases enlared postcards, original postcards themselves and other travelers’ items from the first half of the 20th century.
The postcards are mostly from the Mimi Miller Collection. Miller, a local collector, donated the 200-plus postcards to the PVMA’s Memorial Hall Museum. The exhibit arranges the postcards by municipality, with sections for Greenfield, Turners Falls and the Mohawk Trail, along with Holyoke and Northampton.
“Choosing these five areas, you can embark on an imaginary road trip,” said Sheila Damkoehler, PVMA curatorial assistant. “You can think about what was going on in the country at that time, with automobiles, with agriculture.”
Along that journey, one can see the trolley tracks that ran down the center of Main Street in Greenfield, or the line of Ford Model Ts parked at a hairpin turn on the Mohawk Trail, their owners looking out across the county farmlands.
Besides depicting the changing technology of automobiles, or the urbanization of Franklin County, the exhibit also allows visitors to see the evolution of postcards themselves.
Early postcards left space on the bottom of the front, below the main image, for a hand-written caption or letter. The back of the postcard was generally only for addresses. Then came the “split-back” period of postcards in the 1910s, when the image occupied the entire front of the postcard, and the back was split in half — one side for addresses, the other for a note, a style still used today.
There’s also a notable drop in the quality of postcards’ coloring during the latter half of the 1910s. Germany had previously dominated the postcard-printing business, even for American postcards with pictures of the U.S. When World War I started, printers in the U.S. started making the vast majority of postcards, but did not have the same level of printing technology found in Germany. It set things back, Damkoehler said.
And the postcards also reveal that, despite the change in technology since the early 20th century, one thing has stayed the same. Much like people using social media today, early-20th century Americans also liked to share photographs and thoughts with their friends and family in different parts of the country.
“Just think about today. We have our cellphones, instagram, social media — clicking a button and sending a text across the world almost instantly. Before that, it was postcards,” Damkoehler said.
According to Damkoehler, the 20th century brought with it a new lifestyle that had more time for recreation, leading to the postcard phenomenon.
“The American public thinking about vacation time and leisure time was new,” Damkoehler said.
Those sites from vacation were sites people wanted to share, even if it’s just an empty street — like the black and white photograph of Avenue A printed on a postcard that “Stephen” sent from Turners Falls in the 1920s.
The exhibit will be on display at the Great Falls Discovery Center until April 21, before moving to the Memorial Hall Museum in Deerfield for May and June.
To see the free exhibit, visit the Great Falls Discovery Center during open hours, Wednesdays through Sundays from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.
Reach David McLellan at dmclellan@recorder.com or 413-772-0261, ext. 268.