Miss Emma Bowes worked at the E. C. Nichols Company in Bangor, Maine.
Bangor is large city and port in east-central Maine.
Bangor is not on the Atlantic coast, but is the northern-most navigable point of the Penobscot River.
For most of the 19th century, Bangor was a center of lumbering and ship-building industries.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bangor,_Maine
In September of 1914, Emma received a postcard at her workplace for the E. C. Nichols Company.
E. C. Nichols had developed an large dry goods and fancy merchandise store in Bangor.
(The magnificent, block-long store in the Romanesque Revival style still stands in Bangor and is registered as a National Historic Building.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nichols_Block
The postcard was mailed from the Massabesic station of a rail line in Manchester, N. H.
Lake Massabesic is a lake of more than 2500 acres that lies partly within the city limits of Manchester, NH.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Massabesic
Manchester, the most-populous city in New Hampshire, straddles the Merrimack River in the southern part of the State.
Throughout the 19th century, Manchester was an industrial powerhouse in New England.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manchester,_New_Hampshire
The face of the postcard is a hand-colored photograph of the Deer Neck Bridge at Lake Massabesic.
The postcard was printed in Germany and published by the Hugh C. Leighton Company of Portland, Maine.
On the reverse, we learn that the postcard was sent by Mildred – who, by her comments, seems to be well-known to Emma.
Whatever the friends communicated at the time of Mildred’s departure was not sufficient, as Mildred writes, “I forgot to tell you to take good care of ‘N’.”
It is not possible for us to know if “N” was a beau, a child, a pet, or a someone who required custodial care.
Emma should also “not let S— run away”.
Mildred reports that she is “having a grand time as well as a rest”.
Her parenthetical “Ahem” seems to suggest that she was indulging in some secret adventure.
One hopes that Emma was pleased to hear by her friend, that Emma did as much as she needed to do in regards to Mildred’s cryptic instructions, and that the friends remained correspondents for many years.
![](https://historyinthemail.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Massabesic-reverse-1024x666.jpg)
![](https://historyinthemail.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Massabesic-reverse-2-rotated.jpg)