Here we have Owls Head Lighthouse, which is just at the entrance of Rockland Harbour in Maine, America. It is surrounded by land which is now a State Park, and so protected. The lighthouse is not named Owls Head because of its shape, but because it stands on a peninsula which resembles one.
It was built in 1852, and shortly after that a little house was built to form a home for the lighthouse keeper. This is now a museum. However his electricity supply seems to have been sporadic until 1895 when a generator was supplied him.
The lighthouse was restored in 2010 and repainted, and it is much written that today it looks much as it did when it was originally built in 1852. However this is not strictly true, as the 1852 structure was a rebuild; there was an earlier structure, built in 1825 by Jeremiah Berry and Green & Foster, as a thirty feet tall tapering cylinder of brick. I have not been able to find out what happened to this, whether it was demolished either partially or completely by storm, or whether it was just changed a bit into the structure on this card.
We do know that this lighthouse also appears in the American Tobacco Company`s "Hassan" branded "Lighthouse Series" a set of fifty large unnumbered cards known as T.77. And maybe on other sets that I do not know about.
In our original World Tobacco Issues Index our set is described as :
LIGHTHOUSES (A) Lg. Die-cut to shape. Unnd. (25) "Honest Long Cut" brand issue. See ABC/119. Ref. USA/119.a ... D76-29
It is very slightly different in our updated version of this work, reading :
LIGHTHOUSES (A) Lg. Die-cut to shape. Backs in blue. Unnd. (25) "Honest Long Cut" brand issue. Ref. USA/119.a ... D900-270
Now if we go to that USA/119, which refers to Jefferson Burdick`s American Card Catalogue, the set is described, with a twist, as
119 - Lighthouses (25) die-cut to shape.
(a) Duke issue (b) Gail & Ax issue.
He makes no differentiation between the two as far as value though, giving just one price, of 40 cents a card.
As I still have a smidgeon of time, lets squeeze in a small note about the G.W. Gail and Ax version. Now they were taken over by American Tobacco in 1891 but we know that this set, and several others, were prepared before this date, and it seems that these cards were issued in 1890. The entry for them in our World Tobacco Issue Indexes reads much the same as the Duke entry, namely: "LIGHTHOUSES (A) Lg. Die-cut to shape. Unnd. (25) Ref. USA/119.b ... G040-450". The odd thing, though, is that there is no cross reference to the Duke issues from here, and vice versa, save the fact that there is a 119.a and a 119.b.
I have not seen a Gail & Ax version of this card, but the few I have seen are very similar regarding the reverse text, which is again only text, reading "SMOKE AND CHEW / G. W. GAIL & AX`S / NAVY" plus a diamond shaped logo with a big "G", and the words "TRADE" "MARK" along the rising edges of the bottom.
They were also printed by The Giles Company.