Tag: postcards from falmouth

Postcards from Falmouth: Falmouth Heights

Posted on by Clint Johnson

Before it hosted iconic hotels and streams of summer visitors, Falmouth Heights was the remote edge of town. Join Valerie Harding to learn about its deliberate transformation into a summer resort at the hands of the Falmouth Heights Land and Wharf Company – and of her own memories of off season life in the Heights, which might not have been picture-perfect, but provided its own kind of fun.


“In the winter when those hotels were closed up, as kids you’d run across the veranda and it looked very ghostly inside,” she said in conversation with interviewer Troy Clarkson. “With the table still set up, you know, with salt and pepper still on the table […] there was not a light on in any house down there.”

Watch the oral history recording here.

Explore the postcard collection here.

Postcards from Falmouth is a local history project of Falmouth Public Library, funded by a LSTA grant and administered by the MBLC.

YT link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-2pv64p5EnA

Postcards from Falmouth: the East End Meeting House

Posted on by Phoebe Acheson

Built in 1797 as a Congregational church, the East End Meeting house has seen its fortunes grow and shrink over the years: from a generous bequest in 1842, to a decline in membership in the 1970s, to an unusual transfer in ownership in the early 1980s.

In this oral history, Rabbi Elias Lieberman walks us through that history to the current day, where the meetinghouse stands as the home of the Falmouth Jewish Congregation. Learn about the building’s origins and quirks, and about how the Falmouth Jewish Congregation updated, expanded, and made it their own.

 

 

Check out our East End Meeting House digital exhibit here.

Explore the postcard collection online here.

Postcards from Falmouth is a local history project of Falmouth Public Library, funded by a LSTA grant and administered by the MBLC.

Postcards from Falmouth: Falmouth Center

Posted on by Phoebe Acheson

If you’ve ever wondered what it was like to weather the Great Atlantic Hurricane of 1944, the late Donald Fish has a story for you. A student of Falmouth history, he recounts boyhood adventures alongside older stories of Falmouth’s modernization and development. He vividly recalls the chaos of the storms of 1938 and 1944: “As it got darker the wind picked up severely […] The water’s coming up, set yachts are foundering along the shore, raising hell.”

His four-part video series also touches on less-explored topics from our postcard collection: the Parthenon power plant, development along Shore Street, ice skating on Shiverick’s Pond, and even the long-gone era of the stagecoach. Follow along with his walk down memory lane, then check out the supplementary materials we’ve collected to complement the videos.

Explore Falmouth with Donald Fish here.

Explore the postcard collection online here.

Postcards from Falmouth is a local history project of Falmouth Public Library, funded by a LSTA grant and administered by the MBLC.

Unearthing Local History & Scientific Samples

Posted on by K.C. DeWall

There are plenty of gems in our historic postcard collection, from views of old Falmouth industry to vacation spots that survive only in memory. Even among them, this 1984 membership postcard from the MBL is unusual! The front image of this postcard is an 1897 photograph of MBL students performing fieldwork at Quisset Harbor, and the woman in the center is Gertrude Stein. Her brother Leo holds a sample jar up beside her.


Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) is best known as one of the central figures of the Lost Generation: an unconventional poet, writer, and artist who pushed the boundaries of her arts during the chaos of the World Wars. But before she became the Gertrude Stein the world remembers, she considered a career in medicine. In the summer of 1897 she came to Woods Hole to take an embryology course at the MBL. (Read more here!)


She never did receive her medical degree. Instead she left the United States for thirty years, and went on to publish, provide wartime medical aid, and befriend and inspire the likes of Ernest Hemingway, Henri Matisse, and James Joyce.


Between their pictures and messages, postcards unearth some unusual samples of history. Take a look at our collection and see what you can discover about Falmouth!

A Gertrude Stein reading sampler from FPL:

The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, by Gertrude Stein
Gertrude Stein: Selections, edited by Joan Retallack
Gertrude Stein Has Arrived: The Homecoming of a Literary Legend, by Roy Morris

 

Postcards from Falmouth is made possible through a LSTA grant administered by the MBLC.