Terre Haute Postcards

More postcards from my collection...

500 Platolene Service Station

This is a matchbook, not a postcard and has the following text...

Universal Match Corp., Cincinnati

Meadows Shopping Center
...Designed to Serve You
500 Service
500 Platolene

25th and Poplar - Northeast Corner
Terre Haute, Ind.

C-8474 C-9700
RPM Oils and Greases
U.S. Royal Products
Complete Automotive Service
Free Pickup & Delivery Service

Matchorama Aristocrat
Manufactured Exclusively by
Universal Match Corp.
St. Louis, MO. - Reg U.S. Pat Off
Patent Pending

B 49914
M-1247
2-1-U-92074

Unknown sitters, Adams Photographic Studio, Terre Haute

Adami's Restaurant

This unused postcard has the following text...

Adami's Restaurant
Ten miles east of Terre Haute on U.S. Highway 40
Adami's also has a Sarasota Meritorious Award Restaurant
in Sarasota, Florida. We feature over 70 different foods
on our twelve serving tables with one of he largest salad
bars in the country and have five private dining rooms for
parties from 25 to 500 and two acres of free parking.
Please call 812-446-3241for party reservations.
The dining room is open Wednesday through Saturday from
4:30 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. and Sunday from 11:30 a.m. to
7:00 p.m.

Pub. by Wriggelsworth Enterprises
4396 Woodmans Chart, Sarasota, Florida 33580
64182-D

Made by Dexter Press
West Nyack, New York

Albert Pick Motel

This unused postcard has the following text...

3DK-1831 [1963]
Albert Pick Hotels & Motels
CurteichColor 3-D Natural Color Reproduction (Reg. U.S.A. Pat. Off.)

Albert Pick Motel
4800 Dixie Bee Road, Terre Haute, Indiana, 47802
AAA
Phone: (812) 299-1181

Completely air-conditioned. all rooms with color TV, automatic-dial phones.
Swimming pool, Sabre and Saddle dining Room and Lounge.
No charge for children.

Albert Pick Motel

This postcard, stamped in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, on March 14th, 1962, has the following text...

CurteichColor 3-D Natural Color Reproduction (Reg. U.S.A. Pat. Off.)

Albert Pick Motel
4801 Seventh Street
Terre Haute, Indiana
AAA
Phone: Wabash 2191
Teletype TH-4

Completely air-conditioned. All rooms with television,
24-hour telephone service. Private swimming pool.
Restaurant. No charge for children under 12.

I found the online article "What I learned from my worst job: twelve people tell about the dead-end jobs they passed through on their road to success." published on 1st September 1996 on The Free Library website...

Newspaper editor Don Wycliff still remembers the names of his fellow employees at the Albert Pick Motel Restaurant in Terre Haute, Indiana: "Evie Baker was the salad lady, and Archie Summers was the chef."

It was the summer of 1965 between high school and college. Wycliff was a dishwasher working days and evenings. "There was minimal exercise of the mind," he says. "In retrospect, it was what people would call a dead-end job." But Wycliff is glad he had it. "I learned a heck of a lot."

The lessons were mostly about people. "I worked with people who were really good folks," he says. Baker was "kind of motherly," and the chef "was a tall black man who wasn't afraid to speak his mind." Wycliff says the power Summers wielded at the motel was impressive. "He was the ruler of the place." That kind of self-esteem was something Wycliff admired.

Wycliff, 49, earned 80 cents an hour at the motel restaurant and tried never to shortchange his employer on effort. "It was something my parents had been drilling into me from the time I was able to comprehend - to do your best no matter what," he says. The experiences that summer readied him for the working relationships he would establish in college at the University of Notre Dame and later during his newspaper career. "I'm the kind of person who does his best to get along with everybody. I try to see the best in people."

Wycliff, the editorial-page editor of the Chicago Tribune, spent years learning about the value of work on the staffs of such major papers as the Houston Post, Seattle Post-Intelligence, the Dallas Times-Herald, Chicago Sun-Times, and the New York Times. His best boss was Art Gorlick, an editor at the Chicago Daily News, where Wycliff worked in 1973 when he first arrived in Chicago. Wycliff worked the midnight shift as a general-assignment reporter. "Art taught me how to be a journalist. He was a taskmaster - he made you do your homework. I appreciate that now."

American Hominy Mills

This unused postcard has the printed text...

A-20826
The Model

I have another copy of this card that was postmarked in Terre Haute on August 7th, 1913.

The mills were originally owned by father and son, Theodore and Benjamin Hudnut. They produced corn products such as grits, hominy, flour and "Mazoil" cooking oil. Theodore was known as Terre Haute's "Hominy King". The Hudnut Milling Company moved from Edinburgh, Indiana, to Terre Haute in the early 1860s helping the city to become the nation's fifth most important center for flour and gristmill products in the 1880's. Six of their mills were sold to the American Hominy company in 1902. The Terre Haute mill was situated on the northwest corner of Water and Chestnut Streets. They also had a store that stood at 113 Poplar Street.

See the New York Times site for a 1902 article about the takeover.

HOMINY refers to corn without the germ. It is served both whole or ground. Hominy is boiled until cooked and served as either a cereal or as a vegetable. Hominy may also be pressed into patties and fried. This dish is especially popular in the southern United States. Samp is another name for coarse hominy. Hominy ground into small grains is sometimes called "hominy grits."

American colonists used the words "hominy" and "samp" interchangeably to mean processed corn. The colonists, unfamiliar with corn, had to learn from the Indians how make the tough grain edible. The pioneers prepared hominy by soaking the kernels in a weak wood-based lye until the hulls floated to the surface.

Colonists usually kept both a samp mill and an ash hopper near their kitchens. A samp mill was a giant mortar and pestle made from a tree stump and a block of wood, which was hung from a tree branch. The branch acted as a spring. The samp mill was used to crack hard kernels of dried corn into coarse meal. The ash hopper was a V-shaped wooden funnel. Wood ashes were put into the funnel, and then water was run through the funnel to make lye. The lye was then used to soften the corn hulls and create hominy.

An English traveler in 1668 once described hominy as similar to the English dish, "Hasty Pudding." Hasty pudding and hominy were the instant cereal of colonial times.

The word samp fell out of use but the word "hominy" was eventually joined with the word "grits" in the American South. In the rest of America, hominy referred to the whole kernels which were skinned but not ground; in most of the South, "hominy" came to mean the coarsely-ground skinned kernels used to make the dish known as "hominy grits" or plain "grits."

From Wise Geek

GRITS - Traditionally the corn for grits is ground by a stone mill. The results are passed through screens, with the finer part being corn meal, and the coarser being grits.

From Wikipedia

Sources:

A History of Terre Haute, Indiana
Hudnut Hominy Co.
Indiana History: A Book of Readings By Ralph D. Gray
New York Times
Terre Haute & Vigo County in Vintage Postcards By Dorothy Jerse, John R. Becker
Wikipedia
Wise Geek

A. Arnold Tradecard

Not really a postcard this is a tradecard. The reverse reads...

Celluloid
Waterproof
Collars, Cuffs and Shirt Fronts
Sanborn's Patent

These goods differ only from the ordinary
Linen, in as much as they are Linen done
up with a preparation of Celluloid instead
of starch, giving them the same appearance,
but being decidedly better as they are
perspiration proof and require no laundry
other than to be wiped off when soiled with
a damp cloth when stained; use stiff brush,
soap and water or Celluline (made expressly
for the purpose). The goods can be worn
a full month without change, thus saving
time and trouble, to say nothing of expense.
Recommended by leading Physicians as a
preventative of contagious diseases on
account of the disinfectant qualities of the
camphor used in the celluloid preparation.
None should be without these goods.

For sale by
A. Arnold
Terre Haute, Indiana

Underneath this text is a pencil note saying "423 Main St."

Letters patent No. 200.989, granted to Albert A. Sanborn, Charles O. Kanouse, and Rufus H. Sanborn, March 5, 1878, describe a fabric for collars and cuffs having outer sheets or layers of celluloid and an interlining of textile or fibrous materials. There was a court case involving the Celluloid Manufacturing Company et al versus the American Zylonite Company et al in New York on June 26, 1888 which is reported in the Bulk Resource website which contains copies of selected U.S. government archives.

This page created 7th March 2005, last modified 1st October 2008