Commanda, Ontario: Canadian History in Vintage Postcards
Greetings from Commanda, Ontario! Highlighting in vintage postcards the history of towns and townships in the greater Lake Nipissing and Lake Temagami areas of Northern Ontario, Canada, including the Nipissing District and portions of the Parry Sound district which are in the “Blue Sky Region.” These Canadian postcards are shown in digital, virtual museum format for educational purposes. If you have images or historical information which you’d like to share with our virtual museum, feel free to do so. To navigate these pages, mouse over the top navigation bar. Drop-down menus will appear of the areas of interest. Click on the thumbnails for larger images. Close the larger image before opening another thumbnail. The occasional duplicates for sale can be found using the search box on the main (home) page of VintagePostcards.org. This is an ongoing project; comments and questions to the webmaster at webmaster - at sign - vintagepostcards.org are welcome.
Please note that while you are certainly welcome to visit the virtual museum as often as you’d like (and we encourage you to do so), these scans are owned by VintagePostcards.org and, as such, they are not to be re-used or re-purposed in any way, for any other reason — including use on another website, on social networking websites, in brochures or print-outs, etc. — without our prior express written permission. Under the terms of the DMCA (Digital Millenium Copyright Act), such use without permission constitutes copyright infringement and intellectual property theft. We hate to have to make that so clear, as we want you to enjoy the museum and we put these images up due to our love of Canada, but the actions of a few have prompted this notice. For further information, please see the footer of this page.
The general store served the community for 92 years, moving to a new location in the early 1930s, where it remained until its 1977 closure. It was the hub of the community, and is a notable example of High Victorian commercial architecture. The store most recently has housed a museum highlighting the history of this once-thriving community, seen in the postcard below.
The first post office opened in 1877, when the area was known as Commanda Creek, with Thomas Carr serving as postmaster. The post office name was changed to Commanda in 1881. At some point after this, as best we can piece the dates together, the post office was in the Commanda general store. After postmaster Carr’s death in 1900, his wife, Adeline Carr, was postmistress until April 1905. Mr. and Mrs. David Watt ran the post office at the time this scarce Commanda postcard, postmarked at Commanda in August 1908, was mailed to Miss Ella Moore of Golden Valley. The sender wrote of a bountiful supply of berries, most likely blueberries.
The antique postcard is made scarcer by the fact that the cancel is from a DPO (dead post office) and the name on the front of the vintage postcard is misspelled as “Commando.” The image appears to be in a picture frame, which is a trompe l’oiel (“fool the eye”) artistic technique not commonly seen in vintage postcards. The technique is employed here in the suggestion of a three-dimensional wooden picture frame surrounding the image.
Other Commanda postmasters included H. Schwarze, Benjamin E. Schwarze, Mrs. Florence Edith Smith, Charles James Hoffman, George Otto Hanselman and Lynda J. Verhage.
Read more about the 162nd Battalion in Sundridge, Ontario, which was founded by James Arthurs of Commanda. More military history is available on the Mattawa military history and North Bay military history pages.
For collectors of vintage postcards, old postcards and the antique postcard. Deltiology, the hobby of collecting vintage postcards, is one of the fastest-growing collectibles hobbies. Old postcard collections interest collectors of antiques, memorabilia and ephemera; collectables such as old vintage postcards are used by museums and historians to document what was.
Commanda, Ontario: Canadian History in Vintage Postcards "James Arthurs, Founder of the General Store in Commanda")
