Then and Now: Post Office Square in Berlin, circa 1908

In the era before automobiles dominated life and landscape, the location of the U.S. Post Office usually identified the center of any town, and sometimes it decided where the center of town would gravitate. That was the case in Berlin, and sometime around 1908 someone snapped a photo of Post Office Square, into which Exchange, Green, and Main Streets and Glen Avenue all emptied. I estimate the date by the 1907 or 1908 Maxwell Roadster parked at right; my grandfather owned the 1907 model, and the postcard image is too indistinct to distinguish between them.

Berlin's 1909-vintage insurance maps enable the identification of every building in the postcard. The yellow wooden building at right, with the broad awning, is a confectionary, and the only confectioner on the 1910 census of Berlin was James Pickford, so maybe it was his. Beside the candy store, the Romanesque brick building with the bracketed cornice and crenellated frieze is the post office. It isn't obvious from the photo, but because of the angle of the street each building on the square sits a few feet back from the one north of it, and out of sight behind the post office is a tiny jewelry store, of which Berlin had an unusual number.