Fall 2007
Greetings from the Tar Heel state
UNC receives historic postcard collection
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“Greetings from Chapel Hill,” ca. 1940. This postcard resembles more modern offerings. But unlike today’s postcards, those of the past depicted nearly everything: mundane scenes of family and town life, advertising, the progress of industry and such disasters as floods and fires. |
Anonymous cotton pickers toiling in the field. Beach-goers in bathing costumes at Wrightsville Beach around the beginning of the 20th century. Advertising for Bull Durham Tobacco, Trailways buses and businesses from laundries to lumber mills.
These are among the images in Durwood Barbour’s collection of postcards that he donated to the University Library. Thanks to Barbour ’52, the North Carolina Collection in Wilson Library now houses a historic collection of Tar Heel picture postcards. Barbour’s gift more than doubles the number of postcards held by the library.
As a deltiologist—collector of postcards—for the past 25 years, Barbour scoured bins at flea markets, made purchases at postcard shows, swapped with other collectors and competed in eBay online auctions—all in a determined effort to build as extensive and diverse a collection of postcards depicting North Carolina people, places and events as possible. And he succeeded, acquiring 7,894 postcards in all. Images of old grist mills, courthouses, textile factories, stores, historic hotels, small town main streets, parades and public gatherings, fires, floods and train wrecks—the variety and depth is astounding.
In placing his collection with the University Library, Barbour has made an invaluable contribution to the preservation of the visual record of North Carolina. Countless researchers will benefit in the years to come.
Steve Massengill, a retired image archivist from the North Carolina State Archives in Raleigh, is a fellow collector. He has known Barbour for years.
“He had an eye for collecting the unusual and things that would document the history of the state,” Massengill said. “Lots of research can be pulled from this massive collection.”
Unlike today’s postcards, those of the past depicted nearly everything: mundane scenes of family and town life, advertising, the progress of industry and such disasters as floods and fires. Many studio photographers in the first decades of the 20th century supplemented their income by printing so-called “real photo” postcards, many of which captured everyday life while reflecting the photographer’s artistic sensibilities.
Bob Anthony, curator of the North Carolina Collection, said that the Barbour collection will be a boon for historians, students of art and photography, and anyone who wishes to see a glimpse of the state’s past. The library has begun digitizing its North Carolina postcards and putting them online.
Barbour said he is pleased that the collection will remain together and be available for consultation and research. “It’s a true collection, not an accumulation,” he said. “Every card is an individual card, and some are truly unique.”
The library included 150 of the postcards in an exhibit, “Greetings from North Carolina: A Century of Postcards from the Durwood Barbour Collection,” that ran from June through September 2007 in the North Carolina Collection Gallery.
Barbour, of Raleigh, gave the collection to UNC’s library in 2006.
By Claire Cusick
