Getting Started With the Western Reserve Postcard Society
I've been dealing with postcard societies for a long time, mostly out of necessity when researching Cleveland and northeastern Ohio history. The Western Reserve Postcard Society is one of the more useful ones if you're working in that geographic area. It's a membership-based group focused on postcards depicting the former Connecticut Western Reserve — that chunk of north-central and northeastern Ohio that has its own distinct historical flavor compared to the rest of the state. I don't love the bureaucracy of these organizations, but the reference material they produce tends to be worth the effort. Their primary output is a membership journal that comes out two to four times a year depending on the current schedule. Each issue contains essays on postcard topics, illustrated with actual postcard scans from the collection of the submitter and the society archives. There are also shorter notes, book reviews, and announcements of upcoming shows or swaps. The quality varies by editor, but it's generally honest work from people who actually know the region. They also maintain a small library of postcard reference materials that members can borrow, though you have to be in the area or have someone ship things for you. One thing beginners get wrong about the Western Reserve Postcard Society is assuming it covers all of Ohio postcards. It doesn't. The Western Reserve boundary roughly follows the old Connecticut land claim — roughly the northeastern quadrant of the state. If you're looking at postcards from Cincinnati or Dayton, this isn't going to help you much. Stick to places like Cleveland, Ashtabula, Painesville, Kent, Youngstown, Alliance, Ravenna, and the smaller towns dotting that area and its surroundings. That's where the research pays off.
How to Join and What It Costs
Membership runs about $20 to $30 per year, though they occasionally adjust that. You mail the payment along with your name and mailing address to their secretary, whose contact information is listed on their website or in the back of any journal issue. Payment is by check or money order — they don't do PayPal or credit cards, which is standard for groups like this. The journal is sent to you, and you're added to their mailing list for announcements about meetings, which are usually held at library branches or community centers in the Cleveland area. Occasionally there are online swap meets or email discussions, but don't expect a modern digital presence. I was trying to identify a specific postcard showing the interior of the Terminal Tower in Cleveland, and the Western Reserve Postcard Society's catalog indexes didn't have it listed under any standard search term. The card wasn't published by a major publisher either — it was a smaller local imprint that had gone out of print decades ago. Here's what I did: I wrote to the society secretary describing the card in detail — the view, the publisher mark on the bottom, any text in the margins — and asked if anyone in their membership might have it or have written about it. Within about three weeks, someone responded that they'd seen a similar card and pointed me to a journal issue from 2004 that briefly mentioned it in an essay about Terminal Tower memorabilia. The essay itself didn't give me the publisher, but the lead was enough that I tracked down the original card through a dealer in Pennsylvania who had a stack of Terminal Tower ephemera. So if you hit a dead end with the society's own publications, don't just stop. Write them. The members often have personal collections that go well beyond what gets printed in the journal, and someone usually has dealt with whatever obscure thing you're stuck on. One thing that trips up new researchers is assuming that a postcard published about the Western Reserve area is necessarily from the Western Reserve. The society has published articles about Cleveland and Ashtabula postcards that later turned out to be from collections assembled by dealers who labeled them broadly as "Ohio." Always verify the geographic origin yourself before citing anything. Another pitfall is treating the journal essays as definitive — they're research notes, not scholarship. I've caught a couple of factual errors in dates and building histories that got repeated across multiple issues. Cross-reference with the Cleveland Public Library's Western Reserve Historical Society holdings whenever possible. They have better archival support and their catalog systems are actually searchable online.
You can find the Western Reserve Postcard Society through their main website at wrpostcards.org. The site is basic — probably started twenty years ago and barely maintained since — but it has current membership info, meeting schedules, and links to back issues available for purchase. They occasionally list reprints of older journal editions on a first-come, first-served basis, and those reprints tend to cover topics that aren't well documented elsewhere, like small-town depictions of rural communities in Geauga and Trumbull counties that have since been completely redeveloped. If you're doing serious work in that corner of Ohio, those older reprints can fill gaps that regular sources don't address. The society also participates in the Ohio Statewide Postcard Show, which happens annually in Columbus. It's the best place to browse physical cards from the region and talk to people who've been collecting for decades. The show draws about two hundred dealers and collectors, and the Western Reserve Postcard Society typically has a table there. I've picked up postcards at that show that I couldn't find listed anywhere else in the society's publications.
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