The Story

These wonderful letters came into my possession in December of 2014.  I was visiting a popular vintage market in Chicago.  One booth had these stacks of old letters, about 3-4 in a group tied with decorative rope.  I thought they might be fun to read on the train ride home with my best friend who also purchased a set.

We read each letter aloud as quiet as we could and found that a couple of the letters were by the same writer, a Daisy writing to a John in letters dated in 1907.  We both awed over the affection and love that emulated from those couple of letters and were a little sad that we only had this small piece of their story.  We must have been reading louder than we thought because when we stopped, the woman sitting in the opposite aisle turned to us and said “is that all you have?”

I decided to reach out to the vendor who had the letters the following week to see if she happened to have more…..and she did……many more.  So I couldn’t help myself and ended up buying the rest that she had for a total of 109 letters.  And I was in luck.  Each letter was still in it’s original envelope (with its 1 cent stamp), so each letter had an address as well as a postmark with a date, so I was able to put all of them in chronological order.  109 letters that spanned from 1905 – 1910.

When trying to get a history of the where the letters were found, I was only told they had been discovered in an old trunk of a buyer who was interested in the history of a particular town.  He just wanted the trunk and instead of throwing the letters away, he returned them to the seller who decided to put them out at the next vintage market.

I only have the letters that Daisy wrote to John.  They are in such good condition that I feel they must have been very treasured by this man.  I hope you enjoy their story!