How Port Colborne's Drugstores Published the Town's Postcards

One postcard in the Niagara Falls Public Library's Francis J. Petrie Collection shows a massive brick grain elevator in Port Colborne, more than four storeys high, with a steel structure on its near side and railway box cars drawn up beneath it to load. The card dates to about 1920 and is described as a colour postcard, roughly 13 by 8.5 centimetres. What makes it worth a second look is not just the building but the small line of credit printed on it: "F. K. Brown, Druggist & Optician, Port Colborne, Ont.," followed by a series number, F K B 4340. The picture is industrial, but the publisher was the town pharmacist. That pairing was completely normal a century ago, and it explains how a small Lake Erie canal town came to leave behind such a detailed visual record of itself.

In the first decades of the twentieth century, often called the golden age of the picture postcard, the local drugstore was one of the main places ordinary Canadians bought stationery, photographs and souvenirs. Druggists like F. K. Brown commissioned printers to produce postcard views of local landmarks, then sold them from a rack by the counter, often adding their own name and a catalogue number to each card. The number on this one, 4340, hints at how many different views could pass through a single small-town shop over the years. A traveller passing through Port Colborne on the Welland Canal or the railway could buy a card, write a note on the back and mail it the same day, which is why so many of these images survive in collections rather than family albums.

Because the publisher chose an industrial subject rather than a pretty park, the card is a small document of how the town actually earned its living. Port Colborne sits at the Lake Erie end of the Welland Canal, the point where lake freighters met rail lines, and grain elevators like this one were built to move cargo between ships and box cars. The steel chute on the near side of the elevator and the rail cars positioned underneath show the transfer in action. Details such as the lettering on the cars and the sheer scale of the structure give later researchers a dated reference point for the harbour's industrial build-out, which is exactly the kind of evidence a written history can only describe second-hand. The postcard, in other words, is primary source material that happened to be sold for a few cents.

Cards like this one did not stay scattered. Local historian Francis J. Petrie spent decades gathering Niagara-area postcards and photographs, and that material now forms a named collection held by the Niagara Falls Public Library, where it has been catalogued and digitised so anyone can study a single image down to its publisher imprint and dimensions. For visitors interested in the region's history, the lesson is that the everyday objects of a canal town, including a souvenir bought from a druggist, can become the backbone of how that town is remembered. The next time you see an old postcard view of Niagara, it is worth checking the fine print: the name in the corner is often a local shopkeeper who, almost by accident, became the town's photographer of record.