" EDWARD H. MITCHELL, HIMSELF "

by Lewis Baer (SFBAPCC)
Edward H. Mitchell was
one of the earliest and most prolific postcard publishers in the United
States and he was a San Franciscan.
Cards bearing his name as publisher have been used, collected and studied since
the end of the nineteenth century – the dawn of the Golden Age of
Postcards. Several extensive checklists running to over three thousand entries
have been compiled and updated. Mitchell published very early
cards – colored vignettes – that were printed in Germany. He
was publishing undivided back cards from a Post
street address before the
earthquake and fire of 1906 destroyed his printing operation and much of San
Francisco. He continued to work out
of his home until he built a plant and warehouse on Army
Street. From there he published
thousands of divided back cards including many views of San Francisco and the
West, series on the Philippines and the Hawaiian Islands, high quality real
photo views, comics, artistic designs and a series of early exaggerations of
California fruits and vegetables. He printed cards for himself and other
publishers, most notably to promote the 1915 Panama
Pacific International Exposition. Collectors and researchers of all Mitchell
cards cannot help but feel a personal link with the publisher because he
identifies himself on each of them as “Edward H. Mitchell”–
not “... Company,” not “... Inc.” just Edward H. Mitchell.”
The
link to Mr. Mitchell as a person, is however, fragile.
While his business has been analyzed and recorded extensively we know little
about the man himself. In the 1980s Sam Stark wrote a series of articles for
the Golden Gate Post Card Club bulletin on Edward
H. Mitchell, His Life and Times that gave much information
on his publishing history and contemporaries and a few vital statistics on Mr.
Mitchell. Born: San Francisco, April 27, 1867;
graduated Lincoln Grammar
School 1883; married Idelle Linehan, also a San
Francisco native, in 1891; and died October 24, 1932.
Mr. Stark, who had become acquainted with the youngest of Mitchell’s children,
Allen, put a bit more flesh on these bones, but Edward H. Mitchell was still
little more than a name, a few dates and a blurred photocopy of a rotogravure
picture.
Hoping
to learn more about the most prominent of San
Francisco postcard publishers I
called on one of our club members at his Oakland
home. Family files and photos were brought out, and we talked nonstop for over
two hours....
Stafford
Buckley, Edward H. Mitchell’s grandson, has been collecting
Mitchell cards since the 1960s with an eye to getting to know more about his
grandfather and, now, to building a collection that will record the importance
of Mitchell’s role in creating a pictorial history of San Francisco, the
Western U.S. and Pacific territories. Although Stafford did
not know his grandfather he does have family memories that bring flashes of
life to the man. He is also an archivist and genealogical researcher, and he
has added a few details of which even E. H. Mitchell may have been unaware.
There
was a letter to the editor of the Chronicle in 1961, Stafford
recalls, asking for information about Edward H. Mitchell for an entry in an
encyclopedia on postcards. Stafford’s mother, Mitchell’s
youngest daughter, was an insomaniac and a voracious
reader and grew excited when she read it late one night and called the fellow,
Edward Lindsay. “I don’t think before that I ever knew about his
postcard interests,” Stafford said.
“Edward H. Mitchell died sixteen years before I was born – before my
parents were married, and my parents never spoke much about their childhood
family life although my mother was clearly very fond of her father. Soon after
that Mr. Lindsay came over to our house, and he talked with my mother. Then, at
Christmas, he sent a Mitchell poinsettia card as a greeting.”
Marion
Mitchell Buckley, Stafford’s mother, had some cards she had collected on her
European grand tour with her mother, but he doesn’t think that she had
many – if any – E. H. Mitchell cards. When he was still a
teenager Stafford
went to a Golden Gate
Post Card Club sale out near the beach where he bought a huge panorama of the
city and two oversize cards of the Tower of
Jewels.
When his mother saw the cards she recalled that when she was a child –she
would have been five years old at the time – she helped her two older
sisters glue glitter and jewels on cards which her father had brought home.
Gertrude would have been about twenty in 1915, and the
sister Stafford
knew as “Auntie Bernice” would have been thirteen, “prime age for a gluer.”
Edward
H. Mitchell did have real estate interests, notably the Edward and Henry hotels
constructed to house the crowds visiting the PPIE, but years before that he had
built three houses on Clay
Street. After the earthquake and
fire destroyed the Mitchell offices at 225
Post Street he used his 3857
Clay Street home address for
business as can be seen on his postcards of the era. “On Clay
Street the family lived in the
middle house,” Stafford
explained, “and the other two were rented to tenants. On the left was the Dohrman family of Nathan Dohrman
Company. On the right was Chief of Police Cook. When my mother was little there
was a roof-top burglar terrorizing Presidio Heights,
and one evening when my mother’s family came home they saw an arm and a leg and
a bowler hat sticking out from under a bed. The family summoned the police
chief who came over with a pistol and chased the burglar away. The Chief’s
mother-in-law lived next door, too, and was taken to the hospital one day,
apparently dying. Thinking she would need them no longer the maid gave away all
of her clothes! The woman recovered unexpectedly and lived for years always
wondering aloud, ‘Where is my green hat? Where is my...?’
“My
grandfather retired from business in 1928. He had given up postcard production
in about 1923 when his oil company became his primary business interest. The
family moved out of the house on Clay
Street and went to Palo
Alto–509 Hale Street at
University. There is an ongoing series of articles in the Chronicle
on architects, and one was noted for building homes
with chimneys – because they looked so nice – but no
fireplaces inside. The designer of my grandparents’ home used the same technique
because my aunt told me that the house did have a chimney but no fireplace. My
grandfather became ill in the summer about two years after they moved, and he
died that fall. He awoke in the night, my mother said, and the doctor was
called, but he was dead in the morning. ‘Heart attack’ is what the death
certificate says. The funeral service was at St. Edward the Confessor on California
Street, and he is buried in the
Mitchell plot at Holy Cross Cemetery in Colma.”
Stafford
has been chasing his family history for years and talked about his grandfather
with Allen Mitchell, EHM’s son. Allen spoke of fishing with his father.
Twenty when his dad died, Allen had left Lowell for
Menlo and was on his way to Stanford. One of Mitchell’s careers was as a
rancher and he had a place in Ben Lomond.
The family spent a lot of time there and was at the ranch on April 18, 1906, a
date memorialized in Mitchell lore because of the “girl” – a
maid – at the San
Francisco house “who put the family
silver in a baby buggy and wheeled it into the Presidio.” Allen also told of
the apples on the ranch which the family harvested and brought up to the city
on the train where they sold them. Frank Capp, the
ranch foreman, may have been a postcard artist from the Mitchell plant. Allen
remembered that they would take the train to Felton, transfer to the train to
Brookdale after calling ahead for Mr. Capp to meet
them there and take them to the ranch. “They must have sold the ranch by the
time they moved to Palo Alto as
they then had a vacation home in Ben
Lomond.
“Uncle
Allen said that when my grandfather ceased business he let his printer go. The
backlog of three-and-a-half million cards was sold in Los
Angeles for $500. I remember
hearing that the plates had been stored at the Shell Building.
“John
Henry Mitchell, Edward H. Mitchell’s father, came to California
from Illinois
where his father was a Methodist
minister. John Henry had three families. A son from the first family, John
Samuel Mitchell, EHM’S
half-brother, was manager of the Clift
and Fairmont
hotels and ‘special agent’ for the St. Francis. John Samuel had two sons and a
daughter, Ruth Comfort Mitchell, an author of some note who wrote numerous
books including a series on historic San
Francisco. She was Gertrude Athertonish and spoke at women’s groups. John Henry then
began a new family with Mary Hodnett from County
Cork, Ireland, my great-grandmother. Soon after their only child, Edward H.,
was born John left mother and son behind and went off to further his lineage
elsewhere. My grandfather grew up with his mother at 16
Ford Street where she lived for
the rest of her life. Edward H. supported her from a young age, and while he
was at school he worked for A. L. Bancroft on Market
Street. When John Samuel died his
obituary noted that his [and EHM’S] father had the ‘first string of hotels in California’ – in
the Gold Country in 1860.”
Stafford has
some tangible keepsakes of his grandfather. There are the two oversize Tower of
Jewel
cards, with glitter and tiny multicolored jewels possibly glued on by his
mother or aunts, and there are a number of photos. The one seen here dates from
around 1913 –the height of his postcard publishing career – and
shows the family: Edward H., holding baby Allen who is sitting on his long
legs; Mrs. Mitchell is beside her husband, and on the other side is Marion,
Stafford’s mother; behind are Gertrude, left, and Bernice, with the large bow
in her hair. On the wall behind the group, only faintly seen in the photograph
and not visible here, is a plain air painting by Henry Gustavson
of a California
hillside, perhaps at the ranch. It now hangs in Stafford’s
dining room.
Edward H, Mitchell was a tall man, six feet-three. Stafford is
six feet-four. That is only one of the touchstones they share. Through family
memories and his postcard and genealogical research Stafford has
grown closer to the grandfather he never knew. His idea is to build a permanent
postcard collection, “the best I can. It’s something I want to do for my
grandfather – create a record that the public can see and enjoy.”

© 2005 Lewis
Baer
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