Portola Festival 1909

When Queen Virgilia of the Portolá [Portola] Festival issued her Proclamation of Pleasure just before the opening in October 1909, she said "the festival has twofold significance, not only to celebrate the discovery of San Francisco Bay by Don Gaspar de Portolá [Portola], but it marks San Francisco's renaissance from ruin." In historical retrospect, Queen Virgilia's list should have more items of significance.
The Portolá [Portola] Festival demonstrated to the world that San Francisco had the ability to sponsor a major civic event and it bolstered the city's case for hosting the Panama Pacific International Exposition in 1915. It also served to engender respect for the Asian population, becoming the first major civic event enthusiastically supported by both the Chinese and Japanese communities.

This first Portolá [Portola] Festival was a wildly successful five-day party, with an innocence and revelry never before seen in the history of San Francisco.

Please show your Portola cards here if you have any.

I don't have any Portola Festival cards or memorabilia, however, I did find on Ebay that the promoters did issue a poster stamp for the event:



Back to the subject of postcards from the event, if you want to see a variety of what they produced, I would recommend you checkout this link:

http://www.postcard.org/portola01.htm

Thanks wt1.

I have a copy of that stamp, and whilst off topic there was also a pin badge

I never knew about the event. That is a nice looking card to go with it. Thanks for showing.

Hi 1847bill

There are quite a number of cards from that festival.
Here's another

This was the first Portola card I purchased

These two postcards are currently available on Ebay:

I guess this is what they did before billboards were created. At least it made the message known to passing ships!



Of course, at the other extreme was this colorful "poetic" postcard: