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 insomniac 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 Berenice” 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 Berenice, 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 plein 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