LAST WORD

Worth Writing Home About

Before the advent of social media and the internet, smart phones, or in fact, any phones at all, a postcard was one of the easiest ways to share with your location with friends and family.

Kimball Union’s archive holds a treasure trove of several hundred of these snapshots in time. Vintage postcards, cataloging Kimball Union and Meriden from the turn of the twentieth century to recent years, capture the exciting to the mundane of life on The Hilltop. What was worth writing home about? Everything from typical teenage requests for a weekly allowance and the cost of textbooks in the 1900s to notes about baking donuts and blueberry pies and even a lament of the “red hot” heatwave of 1942.

George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and the Statue of Liberty grace one-cent stamps. Most of these postcards originate on The Hilltop with their final destinations covering the entirety of New England and reaching beyond to Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and New York City. It seems no matter the year, the KUA experience has always been one to write home about.

KIMBALL UNION ACADEMY P.O. BOX 188 MERIDEN, NH 03770

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