A Scrapbook of Postal Telegraph - Cable Company Material

Various: Various, 1900. Very good. A scrapbook of photographs, drawings, newspaper clippings, letters, telegrams, company documents, etc., 1890s - 1940s; 11 1/2 x 10 1/2; pp. [74], mostly recto only; sheets housed in a contemporary, tri-ring binder; many of the photographs subtitled in manuscript; some of the sheets with small cuts at perforations; occasional spotting and edge-wear; overall in very good condition.Assembled by a long-term employee and later, executive officer, in Kansas City, Missouri and San Francisco, of the Postal Telegraph - Cable Company, the scrapbook contained an interesting glimpse into the history of the only viable competitor to Western Union in the United States at the end of the 19th century. The company was founded in the 1880s by Irish-American industrialist John William Mackay (1831 - 1902), who had amassed a vast fortune in silver mining in the Comstock Lode. Bryant Fields, the compiler of the current scrapbook, had begun working for the Mackay venture in its early years at the age of just 14 (there is a studio photograph of him at the start of his employment). Some of the assembled images included storefronts of the Postal Telegraph Company aross several states, a 1926 hole-digger and pole-setter machinery and operators across the desolate Arizona desert on the Los Angeles - Texas line, a submarine cable repair outfit, employees inside the Salt Lake City station, and many more. There were also personal photographs of trips of the Fields Family. Other items included several manuscript- and typed company lists of authorized positions and salaries, telegrams, clipped newspaper articles and cartoons, and so on.