The Can Pile

This picture of The Can Pile in Casselton, North Dakota is printed on the 1-cent Jefferson postal card of 1914-1951. The cars appear to be late 1940s and earlier. At that time the size of the pile was listed as 20 ft. diameter and 50 ft. high. The Can Pile was a tourist attraction created next to a Sinclair gas station in 1933 by Max Taubert. It looks like one could fill up on beer as well as gas there.

For a recent history of The Can Pile, see the post on the Eccentric Roadside blog, No can do: The late, great world's tallest used oil can stack of Casselton, North Dakota.

Hillbilly Rest-Runt Comics

 

 

These three comic hillbilly postcards were compliments of the Hillbilly Rest-Runt, Hillbilly City, Ashevile, North Carolina.

 
Smorgasbord Sundays (SS) restaurant and food postcards

The Black Forest Village - Century of Progress 1934

The postcard above has a panoramic drawing of the "Schwarzwald Dorf" which was a representation of  a German country village in the winter. The German Black Forest Village was one of the foreign villages at the 1934 Century of Progress Exposition in Chicago. (Merrie England was one of the other villages and was featured in last week's Sepia Saturday post). Buildings had synthetic snow banked on roofs and artificial icicles hanging from eaves. There were a toboggan slide, a frozen mill pond, and air-conditioned buildings.

Here is how the Black Forest Village was described in the Official 1934 World's Fair Guidebook:

Ice skating exhibitions are given continuously on the mill pond. Surrounding the mill pond are picturesque village houses and shops in which are carried on German home industries. You see cuckoo clocks made, canes carved and a village blacksmith hammering out small useful articles. Home manufacture of Kirsch is one of the village activities. German orchestra and strolling musicians give the musical entertainment. The villagers are in the quaint German mountaineer costumes.

The postcards below show some of the Black Forest Village scenes published by Western Photogravure Co. of Chicago. Put on your walking shoes and join the fairgoers for a walking tour of the village.

Exterior View

North Gate

Street Scene

Old Watch Tower

The Promenade

Ice Pond


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Merrie England at A Century of Progress Exposition 1934

The English Village, known as "Merrie England," at the 1934 Century of Progress Exposition in Chicago was one of the "villages" that were added for the second year of the Fair. There were recreations of villages from foreign lands and past times, which also included Streets of Paris, Belgian Village, Italian Village, Spanish Village, Swiss Village, Colonial Village, Black Forest Village, Irtish Village, and Tunisian Village. The postcard above has a drawing of an aerial view of the English Village. The facade or outside wall of the village had recreations of castle architecture, while inside there were various types of historical buildings. The back of this postcard has the printed description shown below:

Other buildings inside Merrie England  that were mentioned in the Official Guide Book of the Fair included Harvard home, Robert Burns's cottage and John Knox home from Scotland, and The Olde Curiosity Shop from Charles Dickens' novel. Careful studies of original buildings were made in England and Scotland, and plaster casts of exteriors were used for exact reproductions of their appearance.

Western Photogravure Co. of Chicago published many black and white postcards with views of Merrie England. Some of them are show below. 

North Gate - Allington Castle

Hampton Court Palace Gate

Norman Gateway

Morris Dancers - Village Green

Shakespeare's Old Globe Theater

Leycester Court

Interior, Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese

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