View Big Hill and Rock River, Near Beloit, Wis.

Mailed 9 Oct. 1910 from Beloit. From Celia. to Mr J Rowe, Stevens Point.

The picture

A catboat with a large white sail and two people aboard crosses a wide river below a dark wooded hill at left; a woman in a long orange dress and a girl in white stand on a small pier at right; the bow of a rowboat holding a pail juts into the foreground.

• Printed caption: View Big Hill and Rock River, Near Beloit, Wis.
• Printing: colored halftone · color
• Condition: slight wear on the edges; a faint scratch line in the sky at right

The back

• Layout: divided back (message at left, address at right)
• Printed: POST CARD · This side for address
• Stamp: 1c, green, Franklin
• Postmark 1: BELOIT / OCT 9 / 7-45P[?] / 19 10 / WIS. (machine cancel, circular date stamp)
• Postmark 2: flag killer (waving flag with stars and wavy stripes) across the printed POST CARD heading and the stamp (machine flag killer belonging to the Beloit cancel)
• Condition: toning and foxing; a dark ink blot over the S of Stevens

Exact copy

Line for line as written. [?] follows an uncertain word; [illegible] marks one that cannot be read; ~~ ~~ is crossed out, ^ ^ written above the line, […] runs off the card.

Message (back of the card, left half, in pencil; the first lines run under the postmark):

Dear Aunt Lil
& Uncle John
Recived your card
glad to hear you
are felling better.
Write to
~~416[?] Ch[illegible] St[?]~~
905 Church St
ans soon
Celia.

Address:

Mr J Rowe
132 Whitney St
Stevens Point
Wis

A later hand (a dealer's price in pencil, the 50 raised, top centre, above the flag cancel): 4 50

Reading version

The message joined into sentences, the spelling lightly modernized only where it helps; uncertain words keep their marks.

Dear Aunt Lil and Uncle John, Recived your card, glad to hear you are felling better. Write to 416[?] Ch[illegible] St[?] 905 Church St. Ans[wer] soon. Celia.

Who

• Aunt Lil — recipient (addressed in the message)
• Uncle John — recipient (addressed in the message)
• Mr J Rowe — recipient (address), 132 Whitney St, Stevens Point, Wis.
• Celia — sender, 905 Church St (her return address; town not written)

When

How	Date	Basis
filename	1910	the date in the scan's file name
postmark	1910-10-09	postmark, as read: the day the card was mailed, not the day the picture was made
card-features	after 1907-03-01	divided back: allowed in the US from 1 Mar. 1907

The readings

Part	Status	Readers
caption	all agree	claude, gemini, gpt
postmark	crux (the day still in question)	claude, gemini, gpt
address	majority	claude, gemini, gpt
message	crux (1 word still in question)	claude, gemini, gpt
signature	in message	claude, gemini

Uncertain readings:

• postmark time: 7-45P (or 7-15P) — the diagonal of the 4 is faint and a pencil stroke crosses it

Reader's note: The sender corrects her own return address: an earlier address is crossed out and '905 Church St' written below, presumably in Beloit (the postmark town), though the card does not name the town. Aunt and uncle are presumably the Rowes of Stevens Point, but only 'Mr J Rowe' is written.

Other copies of this view

Scans of the same printed picture that are not cards of this collection (matched by picture fingerprint):

• 1910 View Big Hill & Rock River Near Beloit Wisconsin WI Postcard.png — source, front
• postcard-view-big-hill-and-rock-river-near-beloit (postcard-view-big-hill-and-rock-river-near-beloit.png) — vault image, front

Scans: 1910 View Big Hill and Rock River, Near Beloit, Wis. - 01.png and 1910 View Big Hill and Rock River, Near Beloit, Wis. - 02.png (sha256 f6ff888cd62f…, e85f23e31612…). Media: front — the scanner's white edge trimmed: kept pixels [0, 0, 1080, 686]; back — the scanner's white edge trimmed: kept pixels [0, 0, 1080, 686]