Postcard story

The Samarkand: one hotel, three postcards

Three cards in the collection show the same building — a Persian-fantasy hotel on a Santa Barbara hillside — made three completely different ways within a few years of each other. Set side by side, they are a small lesson in how one subject moved through the postcard trade of the 1920s, and how each kind of card gives up its date differently.

A Persian fantasy in Santa Barbara

The Samarkand did not begin as a hotel. In 1915 Dr. Prynce Hopkins built “Boyland II,” a private boys’ school, on a hillside above Santa Barbara, and laid out its grounds in an elaborate Persian motif: garden terraces, a rose pergola, a colonnade of white concrete pillars, and an artificial lake that held a sculpted relief map of the world for teaching the boys geography.

When Hopkins left for Europe in 1918 and the school failed, his mother, Mary Hopkins, turned the property into a hotel. It opened in 1920 as the Samarkand Persian Hotel — the name, according to one of its promotional flyers, meaning “heart’s desire.” For twenty years it was one of the city’s showpieces, its eighty pillars framing a reflecting pool, its rooms decorated in Persian red, brown, gold and orange. It operated as a hotel until 1940, passed through several owners — among them the heiress Alma Spreckels — and housed Marines during the war. The gardens are gone now; part of the grounds became housing, and sixteen acres are today a retirement community that still carries the name.

Three cards, three ways of seeing

Each of these went on sale while the Samarkand was a working hotel, so each one is a card of the years 1920–1940. What sets them apart is how they were made — and, conveniently, each dates by a different clue.

A real photo postcard of the Samarkand Persian Hotel, Santa Barbara, from the Postcard Origins collection — **The real photograph.** The most documentary of the three: an actual black-and-white photograph printed on postcard stock. It carries no publisher and no title flourish — just the image. Its date lives on the back, in the Artura stamp box (paper made 1910–1924); since the hotel only opened in 1920, the card is **1920–1924**.Scanned from the Postcard Origins collection

A hand-colored postcard of the Samarkand Persian Hotel, Santa Barbara, from the Postcard Origins collection — **The hand-colored card.** The same kind of photograph, tinted by hand — a middle path between the plain real photo and full-color printing, and to my eye the loveliest of the three. It was sold by Osborne’s of Santa Barbara. With no postmark, stamp box, or printer’s mark I can make out, it is the hardest of the three to pin down — the hotel’s years and the card’s style place it in the 1920s.Scanned from the Postcard Origins collection

A white-border color-printed postcard of the Samarkand Persian Garden, from the Postcard Origins collection — **The white-border card.** The mass-produced version: a color-printed lithograph with the plain white frame that names its era. It was published by Western Publishing & Novelty Co. of Los Angeles but *printed* by Curt Teich of Chicago — the C.T. American Art imprint runs down the back — so its Teich production number, A-91619, dates the printing through our own Teich decoder to **1922**. It is also the only one of the three that was mailed: the Pomona postmark reads 1924. Printed in 1922, posted two years later — two independent clues in agreement.Scanned from the Postcard Origins collection

A real photograph, a hand-tinted print, and a color lithograph — one building, three techniques, all within a few years, each dated by a different clue: the stamp box, the publisher and its style, the Teich number and the postmark. That is the whole method of this site, gathered onto one hillside.

Artura stamp box White-border era How to date a postcard