Jigsaw for October 2026: Main Street, Norwich, in 1949
This real-photo postcard, number 1416, looks north up Main Street from the corner of Elm. When Lois Overton posted it on Facebook in September, with the note "This is dated 1949," it looked familiar, and it sent me back to my own files, because I have run it before. So a tip of the hat to Lois, and thanks to her for the old photographs she keeps posting. They are a pleasure to come across.
Where this picture has been
Before The Curioustorian existed, these puzzles went out every Sunday by email to the Norwich, Thetford and Hartford lists, for the Norwich Historical Society. This one went out more than two years ago, on September 8, 2024. Or rather, it went out twice: the first email that morning linked to the wrong puzzle, the previous week's Union Village schoolhouse, and three of you wrote in before breakfast to tell me so. The correction followed a few hours later.
It was also meant as a pair. The week before, the puzzle was the 1898 village school on the green, now the Lewis House, and this view was taken a few steps away. That's the brick building on the right. The school has since had its own post here, The School on the Green. This one never made the move when the puzzles came over to Substack, so here it is.
Back then it went out in black and white. This time around I had Claude colorize it, and the puzzle is cut from the color version. The original black and white is with the full-resolution images at the end.
The sign on the pole
On the pole at left, above the weight-limit sign, hangs a round sign reading "Emergency Calls" and "A.L.A." That's the Automobile Legal Association, a motor club and an early rival of AAA. (My 2024 email called it the "American Legal Association." It wasn't.) A sign like this marked a place a member could get help on the road.
The ALA also published the Green Book, a touring guide with turn-by-turn directions from town to town, written for an age before numbered highways: "at garage: turn right," or "take the curve between church and cemetery." After that 2024 email, David Fisk of Post Mills offered the Historical Society his own 1926 Green Book, Volume 1, covering New England and Canada. More on that below.
The Green Book did not send its members down this street. The 1920 edition's Trip 216, White River Junction to Bretton Woods, crosses into New Hampshire at West Lebanon and runs north through Hanover, then up the New Hampshire side to Lyme and back across to Thetford, Fairlee, Bradford and Wells River. Norwich gets one parenthesis: "(Across the river for Norwich, Vt.)" It did get an advertisement farther down the same page. The Newton Inn, today's Norwich Inn, promised "electric lights, hot water heat, open fires" and, for the motorist, "garage and supplies."
The same corner today
More from Norwich
A word of thanks
To David Fisk of Post Mills, who gave his 1926 Green Book to the Norwich Historical Society. He offered it the same morning I sent out the correction for the wrong puzzle link, so something good came of the mistake. Thank you, David.
Full-resolution images
The postcard in color and as it came, the A.L.A. sign, the Green Book page and today's view
Thanks for your support, as always,
Cameron Cross
Sources
Postcard courtesy of the Norwich Historical Society, colorized by Claude. Route and advertisement quotations from the 1920 Automobile Green Book, Volume I, Internet Archive. Green Book background from the Hopewell Valley History Project's 1924 A.L.A. Green Book page. Present-day view from Google Street View.