Greetings of “wish you were here” awaited each visitor to the Brick Store Museum’s exhibition, Mailed from Maine: Vintage Postcards of the Kennebunks. The show invited visitors to step back in time and visit the Kennebunks as seen through more than one hundred postcards selected from the museum’s permanent collections.

Postcards can commemorate a holiday or event, memorialize a location, or capture a moment in history and always deliver the message of “wish you were here.” Postcards in the exhibition celebrated the towns of Kennebunk and Kennebunkport, representing all aspects of these communities, from their landmark hotels, to scenic views of the beach, to sights that have since disappeared. 

To emulate the energy of the era, guests were surrounded by several large-format prints of vibrant postcards and the sounds of swing music. A colorful timeline illustrating the development of postcards welcomed guests to the exhibition, offering tips on dating postcards by the details. An interactive game challenged visitors to test their knowledge of postcard history. With the message on the back of a postcard often just as interesting as the picture on the front, guests were invited to look at dozens of hand-written postcard messages from the early 1900s and compare this historical form of “quick” communication with today’s Twitter community. Visitors even got an up-close look at several fascinating early twentieth-century cameras that produced the kinds of postcards on display.