GREENE — At the very start of his presentation of old postcards from the early days of Greene, historian Lew Alessio made one thing clear: If someone were to spot his grandmother in one of the slides, or if that person recognized an old building that was misidentified, Alessio wanted to hear about it at once. 

That moment came near the end of Alessio’s recent presentation at the Greene Historical Society as he was pointing out a building that he presumed was no longer there. 

“That’s my house!” shouted a man in the audience. 

Turns out the house that Alessio believed was long gone was still standing. What followed was a long discussion of what that house had been, what it was now and in what capacity it had served over the years between the late 1800s and present day. 

This was the kind of thing Alessio was here for. A former New Yorker who moved to Greene more than 50 years ago, the man digs local history, and as he was to demonstrate to the dozens who showed up for his presentation Oct. 17, a lot of that history, surprisingly, can be discovered through postcards. 

Generic postcards of the day left a blank space that could be filled in with a town’s name by the traveling salesman, who was nicknamed a “drummer” because he drummed up business.

The history of postcards, as it happens, is interesting all by itself. 

“For the first two decades of the 20th century,” Alessio tells me, “postcard collecting was actually the biggest hobby in the United States. In one year, something like 700,000 postcards were posted through the United States post office. That would be seven for every man, woman and child in the United States. 

“The interesting thing though,” he says “is that in all the hundreds of postcards I’ve collected, most of them were never posted — which means that there were millions, likely billions, of postcards in those first 20 years.” 

Back in those days, in a little town like Greene, postcards would have been sold in two of the town variety stores, namely Sawyer Bros. and J.M. Tanguay’s. But they wouldn’t have been the kind of postcards we’re familiar with now. These postcards would have featured a generic, non-local photo with the message “Greetings from Greene, Maine” stamped on the bottom. 

Where was the fun in that? 

This undated postcard, with “Main St. Greene Me.” written on it, shows people and their two teams of horses paused for the photo.

Then, in the early 1900s, the Eastern Publishing Company sent photographers all over New England in summertime to take pictures in all the communities they found, from big cities to tiny towns, preserving the images on glass plates. 

“They put them on the train,” Alessio explains, “they sent them down to the main office, had them published into postcards and then sent back to all these small towns.” 

Just like that, one could buy a postcard in Greene that actually featured some local landmark, such as the Grange Hall, the train depot or just a view down the main drag known as Broadway in those times. 

The Eastern Publishing Company, as it turns out, was located in a Belfast, Maine, in a building now owned by Downeast Magazine, which bought the building along with some 30,000 glass plates featuring images of small towns all over New England. The photographs were donated to a museum in Belfast.

This undated postcard shows the Androscoggin Grange Hall in Greene.

The interest in postcards from those early days remains high. On eBay alone, a rare postcard can fetch up to $9,000 from an avid and well-heeled collector.

Alessio is full of interesting information like this, but mostly, he’s about the local history. This is a man who came to Greene more than 50 years ago with plans to stay just long enough to renovate a house. But the draw of small-town Maine sucked him in and now, as Alessio puts it, he’s “52 years into a 10-year renovation.” 

As he presented his slideshow of the old postcards of Greene, there was much sleuthing to be done. While many of the old postcards are self explanatory — “The girls in Greene are live wires,” advises the message on one postcard, which features a generic image of a well-dressed man ogling a young woman sitting on a swing — not all of the local buildings from more than a century ago could be identified with any precision. 

That’s where the audience participation came in handy. 

While trying to identify one building, behind what used to be the train station, Alessio points out a sign for J.M. Tanguay, which would have been a store at the time.  

“That building doesn’t exist anymore,” one man said from his chair. “I played in it as a kid. It was pretty dilapidated.” 

Greene resident Lew Alessio says this postcard represents the human stories behind many of the postcards sent during their heyday, with this card being used to send a loving message from a husband to his family. “Here is a postcard mailed in the early 1900s. Likely, the writer wrote the message upside down . . . his best defense against prying eyes,” Alessio says.

This is the good stuff, for Alessio. This is where the slideshow becomes less about places and things and more about the Greene community that existed way back when and about the community that exists here still. 

“What was important to me in presenting was the humanity that we can observe in these images,” Alessio says. “More than just a bunch of buildings, most of which don’t exist anymore, these are stories of people’s lives.” 

And the images presented by Alessio vividly reveal that the town of Greene was an absolutely thriving place. Going way back to the early 1800s, Alessio observes that Greene once rivaled, and even surpassed, the growing city of Lewiston at its southern border.  

In the year 1810, Greene had a population of 1,277, a couple hundred souls more than the 1,038 that populated Lewiston. 

“After the incorporation of Greene in 1788,” Alessio tells the group, “its supremacy and importance continued many years. The settlers of Lewiston availed themselves of superior educational advantages by educating their children here.” 

The train came to Greene in 1849 and the station was once a busy place.

In those years, roughly 30 Greene residents operated shops of some kind; a big number for a town of this size. The town had a lot going on. Nobody really knows why the population numbers began to fall so steeply near the end of the 19th century. Come the new year of 1900, the population of Greene was down to 826 and it dropped even lower in coming years, bottoming out at 670 in 1920 before starting to creep up again. It stands at over 4,000 today.

The postcards, when viewed collectively and with an eye for detail, have a way of transporting the viewer back to a long-ago time when Greene was a very different place — and yet in ways, not so different at all. 

In one postcard, a woman sits atop a horse-drawn carriage in the middle of a dirt street. To the left, a man stands posing with a pair of horses of his own. It’s a different time, certainly, but if one is familiar enough with the town, and if one squints at that image long enough, the present day seems to superimpose itself across the image.  

This is where the Grange Hall stands today, the viewer will realize. The big Baptist church would be over there, just out of the frame, and what is now the town’s Transportation Department is just up the road a sneeze. 

In one image, a motorized car creeps up Broadway. In another, a man in a tie stands outside the train depot, his arms crossed while two boys lounge on a bench. There is an image of the Grange Hall yard crawling with hundreds of people — was there a funeral there or a wedding? — and more than a few of the thriving stores and shops of that time. 

A postcard of the Greene Baptist Church after it was rebuilt at the beginning of the 1900s.

Looking at Alessio’s old postcards seems to reveal what the old-timers tend to refer to as “simpler times.”  

“It’s a chance to go back to the days when Greene was a close community,” says Alessio. “In light of the chaos in the world today, it will be fun to time-machine to somehow quieter, maybe less complicated times of penny candy at Sawyer’s store, the arrival of daily mail at the post office, or a down-home show at the Androscoggin Grange.” 

Maybe there’s a lesson in that, Alessio muses. All across the country are small towns a lot like Greene and their histories would look pretty much the same. 

In a much louder world of rampaging technology, online arguments, 24-hour news and no end of societal unrest, maybe the towns that managed to stay small and true to the small-town philosophy are really onto something. 

“Right now in our country, there is so much chaos, so much that seeks to divide us,” Alessio says. “My kick, my enjoyment, is seeing what we have in common: our history.”