Miss Frances Judge lived in Lancaster, the prosperous and historic city in southeast Pennsylvania.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lancaster,_Pennsylvania

Frances’ home is on Marion Street, one of the narrower streets that divided the blocks of the major streets of the city grid.

The house, a pretty red-brick townhouse of about 1070 square feet, was built in 1900.

https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/806-E-Marion-St-Lancaster-PA-17602/9731924_zpid

In July of 1912, Frances received a postcard from Elizabeth.

The postcard was mailed from Pottsville, a city on the Schuylkill River in Schuylkill County of east-central Pennsylvania.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pottsville,_Pennsylvania

A seam of coal was discovered in this area in 1790, and mines and forges soon appeared throughout this “anthracite region”.

The Philadelphia & Reading Coal and Iron Company was one of the large companies operating in Pottsville.

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The face of the postcard is a hand-colored photograph of a section of the “Old Schuylkill Canal” winding through a portion of the city.

From the Wiki:

“The Schuylkill Canal …was a system of interconnected canals and slack-water pools along the Schuylkill River in the U.S. state of Pennsylvania, built as a commercial waterway in the early 19th-century. Chartered in 1815, the navigation opened in 1825, to provide transportation and water power.”

The Canal was essential to the industries of central Pennsylvania, but also to the great cities of Philadelphia and New York which depended upon enormous supplies of coal.

The rapid development of the railroads condemned the Canal system to eventual obsolescence.

By 1912, this was already the “Old Canal”.

In the picture, disturbances of the water surface suggest the remnants of mill dams and drainage pipes that once supported industries along the route.

All operations of the Canal ceased by 1931 and was the network was almost entirely filled in by the 1950’s.

This postcard photograph was published by Albert Deichler of Lancaster, PA.

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There is no message on the reverse – only the signature of “Elizabeth”.

It is possible that Elizabeth and Frances were members of a postcard club and were accustomed to sending local scenes to one another.

Frances preserved the postcard in very good condition throughout her life.

One hopes that she and Elizabeth maintained their correspondence for many years.