Thursday, July 11, 2019

Vermilion in Post Cards – Part 4: Lighthouse, Vermilion-on-the-Lake and Crystal Beach

Today I’m wrapping up my series on Vermilion as seen though postcards found mainly on Ebay. We'll start with Vermilion’s lighthouse, which was a popular postcard topic.

(I’m fairly ignorant about Vermilion history, and was surprised to read on a Wiki page that the lighthouse shown in the above postcards was taken down in 1929 and sent to Buffalo (where it was originally built) to be renovated. Although today it is privately owned, it’s still in use in New York as the East Charity Shoal Light.)

The Vermilion-On-The-Lake clubhouse was also a popular postcard subject. I wrote about this iconic building a few times, including here.
I’ve done a couple posts about Crystal Beach. Lately there have been many vintage postcards for sale on Ebay for this iconic Vermilion attraction. Some of the postcards seem like they should be for one of the other same-named amusement parks, but the backs of them and postmarks confirm that they are indeed Crystal Beach in Vermilion.

(Postmarked 1910)
(Postmarked 1914)
(Postmarked 1927)
(Postmarked 1943)
It’s a little harder to find postcards of Cask Villa (soon to get its own post on this blog).
But I was happy to find a vintage postcard of one Vermilion subject that I’ve written about, namely Motel Plaza. It was part of my series about Rusine’s (here). And it’s still doing business out there on U.S. Route 6 with the same name.