While Paul Revere made his famous ride at the start of the Revolutionary War in 1775 to alert Americans of the arrival of British soldiers, by most accounts, it took about 20 years for him to be honored on a trading card.

Trying to determine the first trading card for non-sports subjects is often an inexact science. That is particularly true if you count cabinet cards and cartes de viste in that definition for earlier subjects. But most collectors recognize Revere’s trade card in the 1894 Clark’s Thread American Heroes set as his first. The cards are recognized as H570 in the American Card Catalog. His card is one of the more important ones in that set because most, if not all, of the other subjects have earlier cards.

Shown below is Revere’s card from that set.

I came across a Revere card recently that looked to be a variation of sorts. But then I noticed the back and realized it was a postcard.

See below.

While I’ve seen several of the Revere trade cards, I had never found this postcard anywhere else.

The postcard uses the same artwork (we’ll get to that in a minute) and was copyrighted in 1908. Like many postcards, the mailing date does not match that date exactly as this one was sent in 1910.

The artwork is the same but the postcard has short biography of Revere at the bottom.

If you look closely at the two cards, it makes perfect sense why the artwork was the same. The trade card was created by famous lithography and print company Donaldson Bros. The postcard was offered by one of the brothers, Robert Donaldson.

My first instinct was if other subjects from the trade card set were used in a postcard series. I immediately searched for a postcard of Robert E. Lee, arguably the biggest name in the set, even if calling him an ‘American Hero’ seems off. Several Lee postcards surfaced in an eBay search and it’s possible that the entire trade card set was made into postcards.

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