We are lucky in the Hopewell Valley to have a good selection of postcards that show historical scenes around the area. Here are three examples of newly-discovered postcards that provide even better views into some of these scenes.
Many of our local historical postcards were sold through the town drug stores, including cards identified as by George Pierson and Paul Cutter in Hopewell Borough, and George Scarborough in Pennington. Even better, Cutter and Scarborough each numbered some of their postcards, and Pierson published lists of his postcards.
Cutter operated the then Rexall Drug Store from 1920 to 1956, in what is now the Hopewell Pharmacy Building at the corner of West Broad Street and South Greenwood Avenue. At this point we know of at least 15 of these postcards, annotated as published by “Paul S. Cutter,” and with titles and numbers printed on the front. This site now has all but one of the 16 consecutive numbers from 2431-30 to 2446-30, but does not have other earlier or later numbers.
Only a few of the postcards in this set are dated (by postmarks), which show that some of them were in use by the early to late 1930s, so they are dated here as c1930s, but may be earlier. Note that the images on many of these cards have been manually enhanced, especially by adding outlines around objects.
- See post on The Hopewell Drug Store Businesses for more on Paul Cutter and the Hopewell Pharmacy building in the Image Gallery
- View Paul Cutter postcards in the Image Gallery
John Hart Monument
The current Old School Baptist Church building at 46 West Broad Street was constructed in 1822, replacing the smaller original church building from 1747.
The iconic John Hart memorial, a 20-foot granite draped obelisk adjacent to the church, honors Hopewell’s own signer of The Declaration of Independence. The monument was installed in 1865 after Hart’s remains were relocated to the cemetery. Hart was forced to go into hiding when the British took control of Trenton, and fell into poor health and died in 1779 at the age of about 65.
We have many views of the Old School Baptist Church, also showing the Hart memorial and the surrounding cemetery. The composition and point of view of this Cutter postcard are particularly interesting, with the tree and bare branches positioned behind (and almost growing out of) the obelisk, and with many buildings visible in the background on adjacent streets, without today’s profusion of trees blocking the view.
- See earlier post on the Old School Baptist Church and John Hart memorial, with pictorial history
- View Old School Baptist Church images in the Image Gallery
Entrance to Ralston Castle
The Ralston Castle up North Greenwood Avenue from Hopewell Borough was built in the early 1900s by Webster Edgerly, a 19th-century health guru who made his fortune selling mail-order books through his Ralston Health Club.
The Castle was a popular subject for early 1900s postcards, including the building and the adjacent gardens (which were a great subject for colorized postcards). Edgerly also provided more images in promotional books for his proposed “Ralston Heights” utopian development on the hill above Hopewell.
These images show the entrance to the Ralston site as an open drive leading from North Greenwood Avenue straight up to the Castle building. This roughly follows the current Castle Lane, except that the current drive curves to the right around the building, and is much more overgrown than these manicured lawns.
The Cutter postcard provides a much clearer view, showing details of the sections of the drive, the shrubbery along the sides, the posts in the distance, and the building behind.
In comparison, the earlier image was manually overpainted into a brown and overcast evening scene, showing the posts by the road, less overgrown walls and posts in the distance, and an almost haunted house with lights in the windows.
- See earlier post for more on The Hopewell “Castle”
- View Ralston Castle scenes in the Image Gallery
National Bank Building at Broad & Greenwood
The Hopewell National Bank was originally at 13 East Broad Street (now the home of the Hopewell Public Library), which the bank constructed and then opened in 1890.
In 1914, the bank constructed this new building on the corner of North Greenwood at 2 East Broad Street, which it occupied until 1971, after merging into Princeton bank in 1956.
The interesting detail about these images is the small building behind the bank building. It sits in the location of the current driveway entrance off North Greenwood, which extends around the side of the building and out to East Broad (where a teller widow was positioned for drive-up service).
This back building appeared in the 1927 Sanborn fire map, which shows it extending further than the width of the bank building. The building then was gone by the 1935 Sanborn map. Somewhat ambiguous newspaper reports suggest that this space included a barber shop. It also may have connected through the back to the buildings behind 10 East Broad, off Blackwell Avenue. (The entire corner was empty in the 1912 Sanborn map, after the devastation of the 1899 Cook’s Block fire.)
Another odd detail is that while the back building is clearer in the Cutter postcard, the telephone poles have oddly disappeared from the scene. The distinctive curved telephone pole with a second apparently supporting pole by the front of the building appears in other images by 1919. And there is a standard straight pole in images of the Bank from 1939 and 1955.
So the back building presumably existed from no earlier than when the building was built in 1914 to sometime before 1935. And the telephone wires existed there from at least 1919. So the Cutter postcard should have shown poles and wires, but was apparently hand-edited edited to move the poles and the wires. Often traces of the removal of unsightly poles are visible in edited postcards, but this one is very clean.
- See earlier post for more on the Hopewell National Bank and its locations
- View the Hopewell National Bank building in the Image Gallery
We welcome additional postcards and images of Hopewell Valley scenes, and more information on these kinds of sets of postcards.
