In August of 1912, Mrs. Rieber visited Wildwood, New Jersey – joining hundreds of thousands of other visitors who flocked to “the shore” on each summer day in the early 20th century.
She sent a postcard to her friend, Mrs. Voss, who lived in Olney, Pa, a neighborhood in north Philadelphia.
(At the end of the 19th century, Olney was still a semi-rural neighborhood “outside” Philadelphia. The numbers of people fleeing the urban density of the city, the growth of industries in the neighborhood, the expansion of the town’s commercial strip, and the opening of the Broad Street Subway transformed the area in a short time.)
The postcard selected by Mrs. Rieber shows the popular boardwalk in the distance.
The hand-colored illustration harks back to a time when the villages of the “wildwoods” depended on fishing and subsistence farming.
(The area is still a great fishing spot; many years ago, I took part in a successful deep-sea fishing excursion from Wildwood.)
We don’t know if Mrs. Voss or Mrs. Rieber were especially fond of fishing, that this postcard view was selected.
Perhaps Mrs. Rieber did not want to be associated with the crowds of pleasure-seekers on the Boardwalk of the seaside resort.
In any event, we hope that Mrs. Voss appreciated the postcard and that the friends enjoyed the hot summer of 1912.
