Mr. Leland Kagey lived in East Canton, a village in Stark County of east central Ohio.
The village, founded in 1807, is east of the city of Canton.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Canton,_Ohio
We met members of the Kagey family in an earlier postcard story (The “Opera Box” at Chimney Rock) – the family operated a lumber company in east Canton.
In January of 1924, Leland received a postcard from his mother.
Mother mailed the postcard from St. Petersburg, Florida -but the postcard relates to the nearby city of Tampa.
Tampa is a grand port city on the Gulf Coast of west-central Florida.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tampa,_Florida
The face of the postcard is a photograph of the Tampa Bay Hotel,
The Tampa Bay Hotel was a gilded-age resort of 511 rooms, built by railroad magnate, Henry Plant, in 1891.
From the Wiki citation (below):
“From 1889 to 1891, Plant scoured Europe collecting lavish objects to decorate the hotel in grandeur. Art arrived “by the trainload”. Despite the immense size of the hotel, the purchases Plant made overflowed the space and the surplus had to be disposed of at auction.”
The Wiki notes a long list of notables and celebrities who stayed at the hotel.
https://www.nps.gov/places/tampa-bay-hotel.htm
By 1930, the era of these early grand hotels was ending.
The ornate building was closed for three years before being occupied by a Junior College.
Eventually, parts of the hotel became a municipal museum (Henry Plant Museum) dedicated to life in the “Gilded Age”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_B._Plant_Museum
(Today, one can observe the sort of “knocking about” that Mother mentioned.)
Dominating the foreground of the photo is a very large, wide-spreading oak.
The printed legend identifies this magnificent tree as the “Old De Soto Oak”.
On the reverse, the postcard blurb indicates that this is the legendary spot at which the Spanish explorer De Soto made treaties with the indigenous people.
So many local wonders are found to be historically impossible, unproved, and implausible that we might be skeptical of this claim.
The postcard photograph was published by the Florida News Company.
Additionally, the campaign of De Soto across Florida and the southeast (to the Mississippi River) left a long trail of injury, devastation, slavery, and death.
https://www.nps.gov/ocmu/learn/historyculture/upload/Accessible-Hernando-De-Soto-s-Expedition.pdf
In her message, Mother reports that she “walked under this tree”.
Mother will “go to St. Petersburg tomorrow” – which she appears to have done.
We might assume that Mother is a hard-working person as she complains that she is “getting tired (of) knocking around”.
She did complete a “drive along the Bay for six miles this afternoon.”
One hopes that Leland was glad to hear from his mother, that Mother found some exciting things to do during her visit, and that the family was reunited safely in Ohio.
Recreation of the Women’s Room at Tampa Bay Hotel (wiki article linked above)
