5/28/12

DECORATION DAY


As of tomorrow, May 29th, it will be 101 years since this card was mailed. Will this card still exist 101 years from now?

Amazingly there is a card like this for sale at CardCow that was also mailed on May 29, 1911, also to New York. My card was mailed at 6 PM, the other card at 10 PM. Both were sent from towns beginning with the letter "B" which means absolutely nothing. There is no grassy knoll to be found here.



2 comments:

  1. Felix0912/05/2012

    I was surprised to see this postcard. I still have an identical one that was sent to my mother in 1912 when she was a little girl. The little girl on the postcard looked a lot like my mom who was about the same age at that time.

    An interesting, additional aspect of that Decoration Day postcard is that in the lower left corner there is a simple depiction of the Battle of the Monitor and the Merrimack [a.k.a. Merrimac]. That famous U.S. Civil War naval battle is historically more appropriately known as the Battle of Hampton Roads and took place on Saturday and Sunday, March 8 and 9, 1862 near Hampton Roads, Virginia. Even though that naval battle was indecisive, it is historically significant because it was the first naval battle anywhere between ironclad warships.

    In the small image on the postcard the Union fleet's USS Monitor is depicted on the left, and shown on the right is what in 1862 was the Confederate fleet's CSS Virginia. [CSS Virginia = Confederate States Ship Virginia] Before the outbreak of the war the CSS Virginia had been a Federal ship known as the USS Merrimack. During the Battle of Hampton Roads, the USS Monitor and the CSS Virginia were both accompanied by several supporting ships of their respective Union and Confederate fleets.

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    Replies
    1. Felix, thank you! You are a wonderful fount of information. You are nicely filling in holes I was not able to fill.

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