A "real-photo" postcard shows the old McLellan's department store on Main Street. The buildlng is still standing today, little altered on the outside.
Not too long ago, I wrote about McLellan's Department Store, a fixture on South Main for decades. In that earlier column I included a nice color postcard of the store (see below).
Historians know not to rely on postcards for 100% percent accurate views or information. All too often, artists with the postcard manufacturing companies embellished the black-and-white photos they had been sent to reproduce as color cards, either by adding colors and details that really weren't there (nice flagpoles with huge American flags are a common touch), or erasing objects (they think) that mar the original image.
I like this old "real photo" postcard — so named because it was printed from a real photograph of the business, instead of an illustration or artist's rendering. But almost immediately, you can spot certain differences.
The postcard company deleted the colorful patriotic bunting on the front of the building. The postcard company also erased the unsightly light poles that blocked the view of the establishment.
What's really interesting, however, is that the black-and-white image above was clearly used as a model for the color postcard below. Look very carefully at the showroom windows on the ground floor. Although it's hard to tell exactly what is on display here (I think it's clothing) just look at the shapes and arrangement of the merchandise, and it is the exact same thing.
The back of the old postcard calls attention to the "new store #108."
What's puzzling is that McLellan's apparently opened their store on South Main in the 1930s — maybe even as early as the 1920s. And yet, on the back of the postcard is a typed message from the store manager, a fellow named W.L. Nolan, to another fellow named W.M. Tuttle, the manager of the McLellan Stores in Lexington, North Carolina. And as you can read, he is calling attention to "our new store #108." Since the postcard is clearly dated April 1941, I don't know why this would be a "new" store in the chain.
He does provide one other detail that I didn't know about the store: The retail operation was on the ground floor, and the second and third floors were used as storage.
A hand-colored postcard of the same store on South Main. Note the absence of banners and lightpoles.
