Snoqualmie Falls Postcard by The Acmegraph Co. of Chicago – 12732

With recent heavy rains in Snoqualmie Valley, water from the Snoqualmie River is flowing heavily over the sacred Snoqualmie Falls. For more than a hundred years, the falls have been the subject of countless postcards showing water flowing at various levels. Here is a look at one card in my collection from the early 1900s created by The Acmegraph Co. of Chicago.

SNOQUALMIE FALLLS POSTCARD BY THE ACMEGRAPH CO. OF CHICAGO – 12732

This postcard of Snoqualmie Falls features a color image of the base of the falls. This is how the 268-foot waterfall would have appeared prior to 1916 when the Snoqualmie Falls Lodge was constructed. Long before Interstate 90 was constructed, the Lodge location served as popular halfway spot between Seattle and Snoqualmie Pass. The card’s catalog number, 12732, and “Snoqualmie Falls, Washington” are printed in red on the front.

The flow of water pictured is rather high which means the image was taken either after heavy rains or it’s from spring runoff from the Cascade Mountains.

Interestingly, the Snoqualmie Weather Facebook page posted about the major flood stage happening on Dec. 10, 2025. They stated: “the Snoqualmie River was expected to cross over to Major Flood Stage (41,000 CFS) by early afternoon Wednesday, peaking Thursday [Dec. 11] around 4:00 a.m, ~55,000+ cfs is possible.”

CFS stands for Cubic Feet per Second, a common unit for measuring river flow rate or discharge, indicating the volume of water passing a point in one second, equivalent to about 7.48 gallons per second. A higher CFS means faster, deeper, or wider water, while a lower CFS signifies slower flow.

They also listed the top 10 Snoqualmie Falls peak CFS since 1959:

• 11/24/1990 – 78,800 cfs
• 11/23/1959 – 61,000
• 01/07/2009 – 60,700
• 11/24/1986 – 58,100
• 11/07/2006 – 54,900
• 12/02/1977 – 53,800
• 12/03/1975 – 51,800
• 02/09/1996 – 51,700
• 11/29/1995 – 50,200
• 01/05/2015 – 50,100

The back of the card contains no information about who took the image but the card was published by The Acmegraph Co. of Chicago. At the time it was published, it would have cost one cent to mail it domestically and two cents to mail outside the United States.

I found a similar card on Ebay which had a date of August 1915.

WHAT IS THE ACMEGRAPH CO. OF CHICAGO?

The Acemegraph Company was based in Chicago, Illinois and operated between 1908 and 1918. I found a help wanted advertisement in The Indianapolis Star on April 12, 1908 seeking “salesmen; side line for postcards.”

I didn’t find much information about the company. Another newspaper article from The Arizona Republic on Oct. 10, 1911 offered one small clue.

“The board of trade yesterday forwarded to the Acmegraph company, makers of post cards, a set of pictures of valley scenes, to be used on post cards. The company sells the cards, the valley gets the advertising.”

So the Snoqualmie Falls card image could have been supplied by a local tourist entity to Acmegraph.  Postcard selling websites like Cardcow.com list hundreds of cards made by this company, many of buildings and sights from the Windy City.

I’ll update this article if I discover more information about this long-forgotten business.

You can see this postcard and more high-resolution postcard images on my Flickr account.