This postcard was published by J. Sidney Poole and shows Poole’s Pharmacy, the drugstore he operated at the corner of Main and Beach streets. I believe he lived upstairs from the pharmacy.

Poole was a descendant of John Pool, who was said to be the second settler of Sandy Bay, as it was then known. Poole died on Aug. 1, 1927, at the age of 77. An obituary said he started working at age 13 as a fisherman before learning the drug business. His drugstore, it said, was a community centre for years.” It said that he was a great lover of flowers and that his garden “was one of the show places of the town.”

Poole published other postcards, such as another that appears on this site, Launching the Lifeboat. Both of these cards were published by Frank W. Swallow of Exeter, N.H.

Swallow was an interesting person himself. Born in 1864, he was a traveling salesman and car dealer before launching his postcard business around 1904. Like many postcard publishers then, he started out having the cards printed in Germany. But he soon launched his own printing business. He went on to produce hundreds of postcards, mostly of New England and mostly using photos he took himself. After Swallow died in 1927, his wife and nephew kept the business running into the early 1930s. (My “Lifeboat” post said that Swallow’s business continued to the 1940, but several sources say 1930s.)