Many of the hotels, motels and inns in this book are still family-owned. Several pulled out old boxes of postcards, flyers and photos for the author to rifle through (which she did with glee.)

A handful are owned by chains including Marriott and Hilton, which stand out for exceptional restoration and devotion to celebrating these properties’ histories. They maintain well-curated libraries of old images and postcards.

And some have newer owners, who love the lodgings even if they don’t know all the old stories.

The postcards coming out of Florida since the turn of the last century weren’t just clever marketing campaigns. They were pre-digital social media – a way to share your vacation with your poor (and likely cold) friends back home. They were tiny works of art. And, with the notes scribbled on the back, they were like messages in a bottle.

For many of the properties in this book, those messages found their way back to their origins. As people cleaned out the homes, garages and storage units of family members, they’d find the postcards and return them to the hotels themselves.

You can explore those postcards thanks to several sites with vast collections in the public domain. Florida Memory is a searchable collection from the State Library and Archives of Florida. The Burgert Brothers Photographic Collection from Hillsborough County Public Libraries lets you time travel from home. Digital Commonwealth, a nonprofit managed by Boston Public Library, is an online version of those shoeboxes full of photos and postcards. It includes The Tichnor Brothers Postcard Collection, at the Boston Public Library, contains 25,000 postcards sent from vacation destinations from 1930 to 1945.

Together, the people, the corporations and the collections in the public domain hold a vast and richly visual history.

Want to have your own piece of the past? Email Kristen your mailing address at oldfloridahotels@gmail.com and she’ll send you a postcard from one of the properties in the book.

Pictured above: Gasparilla Inn (Image courtesy Digital Commonwealth)