Mrs. Margaret Miner lived in Mont Alto, a borough at the base of South Mountain in Franklin County of south-central Pennsylvania.
Located on the Antietam Creek, near the border of Maryland, Mont Alto was the home of a large Tuberculosis Sanitarium in the early 20th century.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mont_Alto,_Pennsylvania
In March of 1925, Margaret received a postcard from C. R.
C. R. mailed the postcard from Charleston, the handsome city facing a bay and the Atlantic Ocean in east-central South Carolina.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charleston,_South_Carolina
This port city developed an early trade in pine lumber and naval stores, but became a center of the American slave trade.
Although a majority-black city, Charleston enacted the most cruel and severe limitations on the lives of the enslaved.
(Charleston City Council repudiated the history of repressive racism in 2018.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_slavery_in_South_Carolina
The face of the postcard is a hand-colored photograph of the famed Magnolia Gardens of Charleston.
These gardens were first developed on the Drayton Plantation, a slave-based center of rice farming.
The elaborate, Romantic garden was planted in the 1840’s to divert and please the Philadelphia-born wife of a Drayton heir.
In 1871, the Drayton family was in dire need of funds and opened the Magnolia Gardens to paying visitors who flocked to the site on steamboat tours.
The beautiful gardens have been a tourist attraction ever since that time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnolia_Plantation_and_Gardens_(Charleston,_South_Carolina)
Published by the Albertype Company of Brooklyn, New York, the postcard represents the publisher’s “Post Cards of Quality”.
On the reverse, we learn that the travelers have recently arrived in Charleston.
C.R. writes, “We came here today in Cadillac auto- 146 miles”.
The travelers seem pleased with their accommodations in the city; they have “a room facing the bay”.
From the room, “we can hear the waves dashing against the sea wall”.
Tomorrow, the party “is going to see these gardens.”
One hopes that the visitors were delighted by the magnolias, that the journey homeward was accomplished safely, and that C. R. had other stories to share with Mrs. Miner.
