Yellowstone National Park Postcards

At a postcard club meeting about five years ago, one member brought a friend along and introduced him to the group. His first words were, “I’m not a postcard collector.” He went on to tell us he had recently helped a friend empty a house in their neighborhood that was home to a 93-year-old gentleman who had willed the proceeds from the sale of his property to the village library.

On a shelf in one bedroom of the house were three shoeboxes filled with postcards. All from the same place, but all different. There were more than four hundred postcards of Yellowstone National Park.

The cards were pristine. Only four had been mailed. The postmark on one was YELLOWSTONE, WYO, but the date was smeared beyond readability, the other three were mailed in 1923, 1926, and 1937. It was suggested that a thorough examination of the lot be done in order to make a checklist, and I got the job. In the end, the library got $400 from the sale of the cards.

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History is frequently based on rhyme and reason, but after many hours are spent in researching and organizing and neither rhyme nor reason is apparent, there is simply no history. A few points of information gathered from the examination were:

• It is possible to collect at least 437 unique Yellowstone National Park postcards.
• At least eight publishers are represented in this collection
  • Bloom Brothers Company, Minneapolis, Minnesota
  • Curt Teich Postcard Company, Chicago, Illinois
  • Detroit Publishing Company, Detroit, Michigan
  • Illustrated Postcard Company, New York, New York
  • E.  C. Kropp, Milwaukee, Wisconsin (a YELLOWSTONE large-letter)
  • Eric J. Seich Company, Salt Lake City, Utah
  • and two, unidentified publishers if it may be assumed they used different backs.
• The postmark dates on the cards ranged from the …
  • Oldest – September 7, 1905
  • Newest – June 23, 1937
  • The collection had representative cards from four collecting eras: private mailing cards, white border, linen, and pre-chromes.
• Finally, there appeared one commonality, the name J. E. Haynes

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The cards chosen for this article are ten favorites. All but one (see * in caption of card 10) are photographs taken by Mr. Haynes. I hope you enjoy the variety. If you choose to collect Haynes’s postcards of Yellowstone, look for the copyright notice on the left edge of the address side, it reads: Copyright by Haynes Picture Shops, Inc., 341 Selby Avenue, St. Paul, Minn. and Yellowstone Park, Wyoming

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There is no known record of an authorized decree making F. J. Haynes or J. E. Haynes the official photographers of Yellowstone National Park, but as in common-law, they have been referenced as such for so long everyone believes it to be true.

Frank Jay Haynes (1853-1921) and his son, Jack Ellis Haynes (1884-1962) are considered the photographic historians at Yellowstone National Park. Their photographs documented the early years of the park and continued for more than 90 years.

The father and son team kept a studio in St. Paul, Minnesota, as well as a concession at the park. Their black and white photos of the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries were much sought after by collectors around the world.

Frank J. Haynes was born in October 1853 in Saline, Michigan, and married Lily Verna Synder in 1878. Their second son, Jack Ellis Haynes, inherited his father’s business at the park in 1916 and continued as a resident photographer until his death in 1962.

Frank Haynes first appeared in Yellowstone in 1875. He was newly employed by Northern Pacific Railroad, ostensibly to replace Asahel Curtis, a celebrated photographer from the Pacific Northwest who started the project of photographing the railroad route from Minnesota to the West Coast for advertising and marketing. When Curtis decided to move to Canada to document the Klondike Gold Rush, the railroad transferred the project to Haynes.