Birmingham's St. Vincent's Hospital on Postcards

In 2014 I posted an item about a photograph of St. Vincent's Hospital that appeared in a 1908 book Views of Birmingham. That photograph turned up on the second postcard included here. I thought I would discuss it and two others postcards of the hospital from my collection in this piece.

St. Vincent's, now a part of the UAB Health System, was founded in 1898 and occupied the building shown here in 1900. Within a few years the facility had begun serving over 1000 patients annually, paying and charity, white and African-Americans. Expansion began in the 1940s and continued in the 1970s and 1980s to produce the large hospital that exists today. You can see a 2008 photo here. 

More information about the hospital's beginnings can be found in Howard Holley's History of Medicine in Alabama (1982). An extensive history is Tom Wofford's The St. Vincent's Story: A Century of Caring 1898-1998 (1998). 

Some commentary is below the images. 

This card appears on the cover of the Wofford book mentioned above and is identified as ca. 1908. As seen below my copy was mailed and postmarked in Birmingham on January 28, 1909. I presume this one-cent Franklin stamp was the one issued in 1908 although the perforations don't match. Raphael Tuck & Sons was a business founded in 1866 in London and eventually moved into postcards. The "Oilette" series was introduced in 1903. 

According to Wikipedia, "In the night of 29 December 1940, London was heavily bombed and Raphael House was destroyed.^[2] Records of seventy-four years and 40,000 or more original pictures and photographs by the best artists were in ashes. In spite of having to start over, the company was soon making progress." The firm lasted until 1959 when a merger with two other companies formed the British Printing Corporation. 

The Souvenir Post Card Company operated in New York early in the 20th century. This one cent Franklin stamp has perforations around the perimeter and is thus the one issued in 1903. We can read the Birmingham postmark, sometime in September, but I can't make out the year. 

Via Ancestry.com I found Ella Tew, living at this address, in the 1900 and 1910 U.S. Census. The address "650 Montgomery Street" does not appear on Google Maps. 

"Tichnor Quality Views" were issued by the Tichnor Brothers of Boston, a graphic arts and printing company that operated from 1908 until 1987. This card, never mailed, must have been one of the firm's early ones. Whoever wrote the card kindly put a date on it: November 9, 1942.

Via Ancestry.com I found this photograph of Celia Reneau from the 1948 yearbook of Florence State Teachers College. According to Google Maps "472 North Pine Street" in Florence is no longer an active address.