The Dryden and District Museum is taking a stroll through memory lane through postcards.
An exhibit, which opened a week ago and runs through May 26, gives glimpses of the community’s history through postcards.
Michelle Walter, the museum and heritage coordinator, said visitors will learn about the history and development of postcards, and some local connections to the world of postcards.
“It covers the who, what, where, when and why kind of thing. We developed it within the last couple of months here,” she said. "It looks mostly at the postcards within our collection, although there are a couple from outside of our collections as well.”
Walter said she didn’t know about the museum’s postcard collection until she started working there, and that it is actually quite vast.
“It's a pretty good collection. It covers holidays, military postcards, some general location-based postcards. You know, those ones that you see that say ‘Greetings from’ that kind of thing,” she said.
She said they also received a collection of postcards which were made in Dryden and distributed across Canada from the now defunct Alex Wilson Coldstream publications.
Walter said the museum has a collection of postcards because they are a way people have communicated over time.
"You can record history throughout postcards, whether it's the topics that are displayed on the front or the notes and communication that are written on the back, the front side always has photos or imagery of things that mattered to the world and the population at any given time,” she said. “The back can trace people's own family lineage.”
She said the museum has a collection given on behalf of a family who had a family member serving overseas in the military, and, “those ones you can kind of trace conversations through, which is neat.”
Walter said she learned something new when putting the exhibit together.
“Well, honestly, I had no idea that postcards were ever developed by individuals or the technology behind it,” she said. “I kind of learned about how cameras and their development advanced and how that impacted the way that photos were used and produced to be turned into postcards.”
Walter said at the end of the last century the Kodak company recognized the interest people had in making postcards and showing what they found interesting.
“The cameras changed, they actually developed a size of film that worked perfectly to be made and developed into postcards, which I thought was really cool because then instantly people were like, ‘it's easier for me to take this film and develop it myself rather than having to send it away or having a whole dark room set up at your house and having to do it that way,’” she said. “So the cameras changed and the printing process changed, people took pictures and made postcards out of everything.”
"We have one on display that is a couple guys after their fishing trip one day. We have some of the high school, different buildings, downtown, different events, downtown and just people and their houses as well. It was anything that people could capture that they felt represented who they were.” “
Walter said people who could afford the photography, would just do a one-off postcard of a photo that they liked. This happened before the ones were mass-produced that people started sending and collecting when on vacation.
She said the exhibit also includes a interactive station which highlights cursive handwriting, which was often the type of script written on postcards.
The exhibit runs during regular museum hours with standard admission rates.
