Article April 18, 1901 Issue

United States Postal Cards

Selected

There are many millions of postal cards used in the United States every year, and it will surprise the majority of people to learn that the centre of the postal cards industry—the only place, in fact, where they are made—is a little village in the mountains of West Virginia. The town is Piedmont, and here, six days in every week, an army is busily at work making the little oblong sheets of cardboard on which so many messages of all sorts and kinds are written by all conditions of people. Here the cardboard is made from the fresh, sweet spruce-trees; here it is cut into the requisite sizes, and here the cards are printed, packed, and shipped, eventually finding their way into every state, city, town, and hamlet in the country, and to Cuba, Porto Rico. Hawaii, and the Philippine Islands.

Piedmont, as the name indicates, is at the "foot of the mountains," and the range is the well-known Appalachian. It is also the commencement of the famous seventeen-mile grade on the main line of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad to Altamont, in Garret County, Md. The elevation of Piedmont above tidewater is nine hundred and thirty feet.

The size of the sheets of paper used on these presses is fifty by thirty inches, and each sheet contains ninety postal cards ready to be cut and packed when it comes from the press. The dies used on these presses are furnished by the government. Four men work the presses. The men each work eight hours a day. One man is used in the casing part of this room to put together the knock-down pine boxes in which the cards are packed for shipment. The boxes are made of pine grown in West Virginia and are shipped "knocked down" to the contractor. The boxes vary in sizes, holding five, ten, twenty-five, and one hundred thousand cards respectively.

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