I built up quite a collection of this sort of thing through the years, and since you can't take it with you, a few years ago I donated most of my collection to the Black River Historical Society.
Nowadays I still check out Ebay, which continues to be a great source for vintage items relating to Lorain and Lorain County. But rather than purchase more stuff that I will have to get rid of later, occasionally I am lucky enough to find nice big jpegs of the postcards that I can download for free.
This new digital "collection" is much easier to store and the price is right as well. Here are a few that I found recently (last week actually). (Click on each for a larger view.)
The Union School
(predecessor to the original Lorain High School)
The Erie Avenue Viaduct (circa 1912)
(one of the swing bridge predecessors to the Bascule Bridge)
Black River and Tube Mills
Apparently this is the kind of view that Lorain hopes to recapture with the recently begun effort to clean up the banks of the Black River over by the steel mill.
Boat Launching
I still remember watching the launching of at least one freighter at the old American Shipbuilding yard in the 1960's.
Boat House
I'm not sure which bridge that was behind the boat house, but that's got to be the east side in the background, since it is heavily forested.
One drawback to downloading the images is that many times, the seller doesn't post an image of the back of the card, so that you miss some of the identifying characteristics, such as the postmark or value of the stamp, which are sometimes critical to figuring out the age of the item.
Many of the above postcards are currently on Ebay – so if you see one you must have, you know where to find it!
