'Darrington, Wash., on the Great Northern R.R.'

Another one of those head scratchers -- there may well be thousands of these postcards, and variations thereof, still in existence:

Notice anything odd?

Some early enterprising photographer rushed to get this view of Whitehorse mountain and a young Darrington onto the postcard carousels at newsstands, post offices and general stores around the Puget Sound region.

The only problem? The Great Northern Railway never had a route to Darrington. It was the Northern Pacific Railway that built a branch route to Darrington, arriving there in June 1901.

The error continued on several variations of the postcard, including this Puget Sound News Co. version below; its divided back and German origin indicates it would have been published between 1907 and 1915.

Lowman & Hanford Co., a Seattle postcard publisher in business from 1894 to 1955, continued the error on the hand tinted color version below, probably produced between 1915 and 1930.

I don't think the error was ever corrected, as I have never found any newer versions of this card — which is not surprising. Postcard companies routinely updated their images every few years as towns and landscapes changed.

Perhaps Lowman & Hanford commissioned a photographer to return to Darrington to take a new photo — or maybe they gave up on producing postcards of the northwestern Washington region when Arlington's J. Boyd Ellis of the Ellis Postcard Company began producing higher quality real photo postcards.