This week’s Flashback Friday postcard depicts the old YMCA building on the NC State University campus.

The YMCA was built in 1913 with partial funding from oil tycoon and philanthropist John D. Rockefeller.

The Y.M.C.A. is the center of social life of the College. Music entertainments etc. are held in this building.

The message on the card, written in a beautiful cursive hand, was mailed in January 1931 by G. Wilder Fort, Poultry Department, State Hospital (i.e. Dorothea Dix).

Many thanks for your kind Christmas Greetings etc. May God bless you & your good family in the year 1931.

The YMCA building was the first student union presence on the NC State campus.

[It] served as a center for social and religious events on campus. After the Student Union was built in the early 1950s and Danforth Chapel was added to the YMCA, the building enhanced its religious activities and was renamed the King Religious Center in 1956, after E. S. King, who served as president of the YMCA from 1919 until 1955.
–  Courtesy NCSU Libraries Special Collections Research Center

The building was demolished in 1975, and  Kamphoefner Hall was built on the site in 1978.

Author’s personal note:
The addressee on this postcard, Henry G. Early, was my grandfather. He was head of the Poultry Department at Baptist Orphanage in Thomasville, NC  from 1925 until 1960. He and my grandmother were also foster parents to  about a dozen boys resident in one of the ‘cottages’ on the orphanage campus. I often stayed a week or two with them during the summers when I was a boy. I have many fond memories of the times I spent there.

Founded in 1885, Baptist Orphanage was later renamed the Mills Home, and is now a part of the umbrella organization Baptist Children’s Homes of North Carolina. Today, the Michell House Museum, the oldest remaining cottage on the former orphanage campus preserves the legacy of the early efforts of North Carolina Baptists to protect and serve children at risk.