In August of 1931, many newspapers around the country published a human-interest story about a postcard mailed from Lake George that arrived at a Northville, NY address seven years later. Reportedly, the postcard departed the Lake George post office in 1924, but it circulated to several wrong destinations before reaching its journey’s end.
The postcard sent by Lem Barber was addressed to Delbert Weaver in Northville, 26 miles away in Fulton County. On August 12, 1931, the correspondence finally arrived at the residence of Walter Weaver, son of the intended recipient. The postcard showed some considerable wear-and-tear from its odyssey.
Barber’s note inquired how Delbert and his brother, Noel, were doing. Strangely, when the postcard arrived, Delbert Weaver had been dead for over two decades. Obviously, the sender in 1924, was unaware of the man’s passing.
Before e-mail and text messaging, mailing postcards was common communication to family and friends, especially when the senders were on vacation.
Throughout the years, there were various eras of government-issued and privately produced postcards until the White Border Period (1915–1930).
German printers had for years monopolized the printing of American postcards. That changed during World War One (1914–1918), when postcards began to be churned out in the USA.
To save on ink, printers left a narrow white border around the image. The postcard mailed in 1924 to Delbert Weaver was probably one of these type.
Moreover, there are other notable cases of late mail. One of the more famous was a letter postmarked from Bath, UK in 1916, and addressed to Katie Marsh in London. It reached that address over a century later in 2021. Katie Marsh had long since died, but when the postcard was mailed, she ironically was married to a famous stamp dealer named Oswald Marsh.
In 2021, a Royal Mail official commented he was unsure what happened to the 1916 letter, sent 105 years earlier. It was believed the correspondence was lost in a postal sorting office, which closed years later.
More recently, when that building was being redeveloped, the missing mail was unexpectedly discovered. The postal official hypothesized the letter “had perhaps fallen behind some furniture.”
Read more about the Postal Service in New York State.
A version of this article first appeared on the Lake George Mirror, America’s oldest resort paper, covering Lake George and its surrounding environs. You can subscribe to the Mirror HERE.
Illustration: A different white-bordered postcard, sent in 1924 from Lake George.
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