I have been delving recently in a sturdy, white cardboard box labeled BOSTON COLLEGE POSTCARDS. The illustrated cards, along with their ink and pencil messages, are part of the mass of Boston College ephemera (it’s an archivist’s term of art, not my judgment) that is the subject of our cover story, including scrapbooks with pasted-in admission letters from 1937 and required reading lists from 1938, programs marking forgotten award dinners, and tickets (both real and fraudulent) to a Led Zeppelin–headlined concert in Alumni Stadium that never happened.

However ephemeral the postcards are technically (or in fact), they convey history. Most were published by commercial firms during the first three decades of the 20th century, when picture postcards were to personal communication what the tweet or Facebook posting is today, a quick, cheap (1 cent) means of sending a status announcement (e.g., I’m in Boston and I miss you; the ship went down but I survived).

By mid-century, the home telephone had become sufficiently ubiquitous as to usurp the postcard’s place as a means of sending quick word down the road (local postcards were often delivered within 24 hours), though Boston College produced picture cards of its buildings and vistas in great numbers until early in the 1960s. Unlike the pre-war cards, the later issues were seldom stamped and sent to deliver a message. They were souvenirs; they went into a dresser or desk drawer, and from there into a cardboard box, and from there into the pile of cardboard boxes comprising part of an estate.

The early card illustrations are the most evocative, naturally: the odd, stiff demeanor Gasson Hall offered in formal photographs made shortly after it was completed, when it stood alone atop the hill, unkempt fields sloping off on every side, a baronial mansion whose owners had fallen to hard times or a deadly fever or the French Revolution; the graceful, formal bearing presented by St. Mary’s Hall, the Jesuit residence and Boston College’s second building, back when it featured a walled-in cloister walk at the rear of its private garden, before Jesuits required personal cars and the wall was ignominiously replaced by a low flat-roofed parking garage; the linden trees along the road to Gasson Hall that were for decades trimmed back into ice-cream cone shapes, (so that they seem at first glance to be wrought evergreens), allowing now-lost views of the Tower from the main entrance; the grandness of the Chestnut Hill reservoirs, which through much of the early 20th century seem to have made up an important local parkland (regular tours were offered), their landscaped slopes firmed by stone retaining walls that framed swaths of grass, carefully placed trees, stone outcrops from which the weeds were trimmed back, and curving, broad, gray gravel paths carrying horse- drawn carriages and recreational walkers, including, on one postcard, a pair of hatted-and-suited men out of an Edward Gorey drawing who’ve stopped to chat and exchange harsh views of the Kaiser or flappers.

But while the picture sides of the postcards are intriguing, the flip sides—”Message here,” manufacturers often noted helpfully—are moving: the brief communications, none more than 30 or so words, written in handwritings that would have been as instantly recognizable to the card’s recipient as the associated face, each message signed with love, or “see you Monday,” or “best regards,” from the long dead to the long dead.

“Once more the Army seems to have put it over on the Navy. How you will enjoy those cigars,” “ex Sgt. Major” wrote on the back of a photo of Gasson Hall (“New Boston College”) to Lieutenant J. King MacLean, of Boston, in July 1919. “This is the church I visited last Sunday for the first time,” Priscilla wrote of the Church of the Immaculate Conception, Boston College’s earliest home, to Minnie DeCormier, of West Broock [sic], Maine on an undetermined date. “Dear Jean, Just a few lines that I am well remember me always as your true friend,” M. Hussey wrote, somewhat disjointedly, to Miss Jean Elliott, of Boston, on the back of a view of the Chestnut Hill reservoirs in November 1907. While seven or so years later, Abbie, writing on the back of another view of Gasson Hall, advised Miss Frances Cypher of Willimantic, Connecticut, “Take my advice Frances and hurry up.”

Whether Lieutenant MacLean smoked his cigars with pleasure, or M. Hussey and Miss Elliott continued in true friendship the rest of their (long? short?) lives, or Miss Cypher did what she was being urged to do or did not and was glad of it or regretful, we cannot know. What we do know is enough, though. Sunt lacrimae rerum, Virgil has Aeneas mourn when in his journey he comes on frescoes of Troy’s destruction—there are tears at the heart of things.

Our story on other things begins here.