Advertisements from the Duluth Public Library Nostalgic Newsstand Sale: To the Orient on Canadian Pacific

David Beard May 21, 2023 3 Comments

One of the cooler things about the adverts from the Duluth Public Library Nostalgic Newsstand Sale are the ads for travel on the train. Before planes, before interstates, the train was ubiquitous for travel. I love this ad for “To the Orient on Canadian Pacific.”

It hits a few buttons for me — my cousin worked for what used to be called “Northwest Orient Airlines.” So there was always a call to Asia for travel in my family — I never went, but I knew relatives who did.

But also, I love any reason to remind people of the infrastructure our community was built on — the port.

To the Orient Ad

Canadian Pacific still maintains a presence in Duluth. This Wikimap shows a rail yard.

… while this map zooms back a bit to show Canadian Pacific’s larger networks in our port:
 

 
One of the more unusual moments in Canadian Pacific’s presence in the Duluth area was the Incan Superior, basically a train built like a boat.

 
Anyway — there might be more Canadian Pacific ads in these magazines, so I will stop there for today and invite some more stories from others. Do you have a CP story?

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3 Comments

David Beard

about 1 year ago 

PS: If the use of "oriental" strikes you as embedded in racist imaginations of people remote from the early 20th century American, it is. There are a hundred explanations of "orientalism" as an intellectual term for the ways that the West imagined the East (typically, in Edward Said's vocabulary, the middle east, but in other writers, the term explains relations with the far east as well; one such explanation is in Edward Said's book.

Ghist1

about 1 year ago 

What year and publication? I too have noticed many ads for train travel, and how convenient and efficient it was (probably from the 1920s and '30s).

David Beard

about 1 year ago 

I'm a bad scholar -- I know it was from Sunset Magazine, prior to 1940, that's all.

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