Aledo, Illinois Rhubarb Festival 2016 cover

The town of Aledo, Illinois – formally declared "The Rhubarb Capital of Illinois" by the state's governor – has celebrated an annual Rhubarb Festival for a quarter century. The festival, in modern years, has featured over three thousand homemade rhubarb pies for sale, as well as crafts, music, and other entertainment in the historic Aledo downtown. For the festival's 25th year in 2016, the town of Aledo offered a lovely pictorial postmark at the Rhubarb Fest Station.

For this cover I digitally cropped a photograph of the underside of a rhubarb leaf against a sunny sky to use as a background. In the lower-right is a scan of a trade card (an early form of advertising card) from the Arbuckle Bros. Coffee Company (c. 1899), picturing a young girl in Victorian garb gathering rhubarb. The image is raised on a drop shadow. The cover bears two stamps in the upper-left: a 10¢ Pears stamp from 2016 (Scott #5039) and a 37¢ booklet single from 2003 featuring the 1886 painting "Child in a Straw Hat" by American artist Mary Cassatt (Scott #3807), who looks so like the girl on the trade card that they could be sisters. (Mary Cassatt's painting is held at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the trade card is in the Charles and Laura Dohm Shields Trade Card Collection at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio.)

Both stamps are canceled with a single strike of the Aledo Illinois Rhubarb Festival pictorial postmark dated June 4, 2016.