COLLECTIONS SPOTLIGHT: HALLOWEEN DELIVERED

BY KATE TALLMAN, COLLECTIONS ASSOCIATE

A gilt embossed postcard from Raphael Tuck & Sons Company depicting a little girl and her cat Josephine. The girl stars in a set of ten playful situations, all occurring around “Hallowe’en” with Josephine often joining her. This card was printed in 1911, at the start of the series’ printing.

The spirit and traditions of Halloween in America have been immortalized in large part by the popular early 20th-century custom of picture postcards. The most popular Halloween ephemera are from the “Golden Age” of postcards, which began in the United States with the Private Mailing Card Act of 1898, peaked in 1910 with the introduction of tariffs on German-printed postcards and lasted until about 1918. Cost effective and bursting with opportunity to showcase personality, the heyday of postcards marked large events like baby showers and weddings, as well as smaller holidays, sympathies and playful correspondence between neighbors.

The earliest postcards were the products of Raphael Tuck, a German postcard manufacturer who popularized the exchanging and collecting of illustrated cards in rich colors. Other manufacturers were the John Winsch Company, whose cards were also printed in Germany, and the Gibson Art Company of Cincinnati, best known for popularizing the “Gibson Girl” icon. Popular Halloween imagery during this time included games like apple bobbing or apple stringing, black cats, witches and carved vegetables like turnips and pumpkins. Interestingly, skeletons or more direct nods to death rarely, if ever, appear at all. There was, however, a popular figure that has since faded from contemporary Halloween celebrations. Rotund pumpkin people with carved faces, gourd-like appendages and pumpkin leaf collars frequently interacted with Halloween traditions on postcards. Sometimes referred to as “bogie men,” this may have been a nod to the Celtic origins of the holiday.

This postcard, posted circa 1910, depicts a carved jack-o-lantern, black cat and pumpkin person character popular at the time. Also postmarked on October 30, this trend in our collections indicates that for many in Clarksville, sending Halloween Eve postcards was a tradition in itself.

Mailed on October 30, 1922, this Whitney Made postcard features the symmetry and bold colors popular in Art Deco print design. The all-caps “Hallowe’en Greetings” illustrates the triangular character shapes common in Art Nouveau typefaces.

The most prolific illustrator of the Halloween genre was Ellen Clapsaddle, an American painter from South Columbia, New York. Ellen was a freelance artist who specialized in postcards, greeting cards, advertising fans and calendars. She is most famous for her more than 3,000 illustrated postcards, most of which depict cherubic children in holiday scenes. She was so successful that she was able to move to Germany and invest heavily in the printing houses dominating the industry. Unfortunately, World War I devasted the connections between American consumers and German postcard manufacturers, as well as many of the physical factories, leading to the end of the golden postcard era. Sadly, Ellen died penniless and largely unknown the day before her 69th birthday. It was not until decades after her death that her contributions to the American Halloween aesthetic were fully appreciated.

A whimsical Halloween postcard featuring a poem and printed by Whitney Made, the correspondence company credited as the king of the “valentine empire.” In 1915, Worcester Magazine assessed that “ninety per cent of the valentines that are exchanged on St. Valentine’s Day come from Worcester.” This particular card was mailed on October 30, 1924.

“A Jolly Hallowe’en” by Ellen Clapsaddle. This design, in series 978, was printed by the International Art Publication Company in 1909 and features the colorful depictions of witches common at the time, most often appearing in red, blue or green.

The cards featured here were donated by Finley Elder Gracey and Montgomery Davie in 1984, making them some of the earliest items accessioned into the Customs House Museum & Cultural Center’s collections. While the “Golden Age” of postcards has come and gone, these foundational artifacts live on in the archives.

View more vintage holiday postcards, from Christmas greetings to heartfelt valentines, at customshousemuseum.org/collections/explore-the-collections.