This postcard was not mailed; there are no personalities connected to it.
An unknown person, perhaps a visitor to the city, collected this postcard photograph of Sacramento.
Sacramento, the State Capitol, was the site of ancient habitation.at the confluence of the Sacramento and American Rivers in the Sacramento Valley of central California.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sacramento,_California
John Sutter, Sr. was the first European settler; he had obtained a Mexican land grant for this fertile area in 1839.
Sutter established an enormous estate around a Fort, introducing cattle and orchards to the area.
As settlers poured west, Sutter’s settlement became an important center of agricultural production, milling, and trade.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Sutter
Unfortunately, Sutter’s rapid growth had incurred debts, and his son, John Sutter, Jr. arrived to assist in managing the enterprises – just as gold was discovered at Sutter’s Mill and the area was despoiled by fortune hunters.
(The modern city has many lovely features; I spent days there on business trips and enjoyed the city parks, coffee shops, and riverbank restaurants.)
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The photograph shows a portion of “9th Street, north from L Street”.
On the reverse, a blurb draws attention to the practice of automobiles parked in the street and to important buildings – the Forum Building and the Odd Fellows Temple.
The Forum Building was an art deco structure erected in 1911, and later remodeled into a 10-story office building.
Today it is a lovely residential building.
Equally interesting are the commercial signs for Heald’s College, the Sutter Hotel, and what appears to be “Monk’s Furniture” and the “Quarter Cafeteria”.
Heald’s College was a business school founded in San Francisco in 1863; it evolved to include campuses in 12 cities.
(Heald’s was purchased by the for-profit Corinthian Colleges in 2009; all campuses closed permanently in that firm’s collapse in 2015 after an audit by the California Department of Education.)
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A handwritten note explains that “This street is quiet as the State Fair is on”.
After 1909, the California State Fair was held on an 80-acre site just outside the city limits.
Thus, the business district was unusually quiet as crowds filled the Fairground.
In 1968, California created the Cal Expo site on more than 1000 acres north of the American River and within the city of Sacramento.
Attendance at the State Fair in 2008 reached 700,000.
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The note suggests that the photograph might be intended for another person; the postcard may have been mailed or hand-delivered.
Clearly, someone preserved the postcard in very good condition for a century.
One hopes that all the visitors to Sacramento enjoyed their adventures there.
