Blog Post: AHS Intern Alex Currie

I am Alex Currie, a senior at AHS and I worked as an intern at Amesbury Public Library in the archives department from January 2025 through August 2025. This has been made possible for me thanks to the PASS Program at Amesbury High School, where seniors get to adjust their schedule day to work or intern during hours they would normally be at school. 

I was working on a project to organize and catalog old historical postcards of Amesbury when I stumbled upon this very interesting postcard, titled “Main Street, P.O. Section, Amesbury, Mass., In the Future.” It stands out immediately from all the other postcards, as they are for the most part hand-colored images of various areas and important sites around Amesbury. This postcard, however, even has illustrations of “the future” of Amesbury on top of the place it’s focused on. It is both an interesting view of Main Street at the time and a rare insight on what people back then wondered about the future.  

The majority of all the buildings shown actually still stand there today. On the right side of the postcard, the large building known as the Wilman Building (built 1899) is still there to this day, and remains largely unchanged. However, there are several other buildings close to the Wilman building in size, but they are now gone, replaced by a small insurance agency building. On the other side of the street (left side of the postcard) is the old post office at 100 Main Street, which also still stands today but now serves as office space for various businesses, and it was built in 1905. Further down the street on the left side, the Main St. building with the address 112 Main St. actually burned down at some point since then. A new building was built in its place that looks exactly the same, and it has both condominiums on higher floors and local shops and businesses below. If you didn’t know that, then you likely wouldn’t be able to tell that the original burned down due to their similarities! Another interesting thing to note is the presence of trolley rails going through the middle of the street, as Amesbury once had trolley lines traveling through it. Based on all of these buildings and the trolley tracks, It is very likely this picture was taken no earlier than 1905, as the old 100 Main Street Post Office building wasn’t built until 1905. Many of the buildings seen in the postcard are passed by people frequently on a daily basis, and they likely don’t even know that very little has changed there over the past 100 years or so.  

The most unusual factor of the postcard though is definitely the illustrations of the future of Main Street. Up high there is a train labeled “Boston”, so it can be inferred that it’s a train going all the way to Boston. There are also various blimps and hot air balloons doting the skies above, with some even bearing wings. Down below there is a “seeing Amesbury” bus, presumably for tourism, and perhaps the most ambitious of all the futuristic concepts: a subway to New York. Interestingly, most of these things have come true one way or another. The flying balloons and blimps? Not exactly, but there are now planes and other aerial vehicles across the skies. A train to Boston does exist too, but you’ll have to go one town over to Newburyport for a direct link. As for a subway to New York there is no such thing, but there is Amtrak from Boston to New York which serve the same purpose, just not in Amesbury. 

All of these future ambitions and visions from the past make one thing clear: the dream of an interconnected society through public transportation. It’s clear that people then figured that there would be such developed public transit by now that you could get to a major city many miles away from even the smallest municipalities, and that flight would be a common thing. They were definitely right about flight, but the dream of well-developed public transportation outside of major cities and urban areas still hasn’t been realized.  

Alex Currie, AHS PASS Program Intern, Spring and Summer 2025