Mount Olive, Illinois is a small city of about 2,000 people in southwest Illinois.
The city is included within the metropolitan statistical area of St. Louis, Missouri, about 45 miles southwest of Mount Olive.
This vintage postcard was made and circulated about 1940. The card was never mailed, and the colors remain vivid.
The scene that is illustrated shows a mountain or upland plateau in the background.
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Comments: 12
I mentioned elsewhere that older place postcards were usually photographs, even the smallest and most rural communities.
Like other trends or fads, cheaper imitations took over. Many linen place names were altered "stock images".
However... It does have the Union Miners Cemetery, within which is the Mother Jones memorial. So apparently this is mining country, but they must dig those mines in flat ground (which does happen, btw). I just can't find any photos with any mountains, or even significant hills, in them.
It looks like the only real elevations in the area are some old Hopewell culture mounds. This was the heartland of the Mound Builder pre-Columbian people.
Some effete photo employee in a far-away studio decided that, by golly, Mount Olive was going to have a mount.
The colors remind me of Roy's photos where I think I need to go back and comment...
Off I go to see them.
It was the later postcards, done beautifully in the late forties and very early fifties that were sometimes created from stock images.