A California man has been returning postcards for 50 years. He just sent one to York County.
Lowell Joerg is called The Postcard Man.
He’s been rummaging antique stores and flea markets for nearly 50 years, flipping through old post cards and purchasing ones that depict old buildings or landmarks.
Joerg packages the postcards into an envelope, slips in a short letter and sends them back to where they came from.
He’s sent postcards to a hospital in Wisconsin. A library in New Hampshire. A law firm in Ohio.
In June, York County was the benefactor of his goodwill.
Joerg mailed an envelope from California to the York County Clerk of Court’s Office. Inside was a postcard of the historic York County Courthouse; he estimated the postcard was about 80 years old.
The photo was captured by Ernest Ferguson, a popular South Carolina postcard photographer who died in 2016.
“Some years ago I was at an antique store and found this circa 1945 picture card of your beautiful courthouse,” Joerg said in the letter, dated June 17. “Lots of changes, I suppose. How the card got to California we’ll never know.”
The letter was extra special for Angie Bryant, a lifelong York County resident and member of the courthouse’s renovation committee.
“I was just blown away by the letter,” Bryant said, who serves as the county’s clerk of court.
The postcard man
Joerg said in a phone interview with The Herald that he first picked up the hobby in Minnesota in the 1980s, where he owned an insurance agency.
He saw a postcard in an antique store with a Pennsylvania church and decided to mail it back. The hobby stuck.
Joerg estimates he’s sent 15,000 to 20,000 postcards. Now 98, he lives in an assisted living facility in Stockton, California.
Although he’s unable to freely peruse antique stores anymore, he keeps boxes of unmailed postcards he’s accumulated over the years.
“It’s always great to receive something positive in the mail,” he told The Herald.
Joerg acknowledges he’s gained some notoriety and media attention for his hobby, and has even been featured on the United States Postal Service’s website.
“I tell people when I write to them to look me up on Google,” Joerg said.
How he does it
Joerg always packages his postcards with a short letter explaining where he found the card and why he decided to send it back.
He also adds in a request for a bit of compensation to cover the cost of the postcard and stamps.
Joerg said he receives a response about one out of every 10 postcards he sends, but he’s grateful for the ones who do send something back.
Bryant said she plans to mail him some courthouse mementos, including pamphlets and a piece of the building’s old marble. She did some research on Joerg’s hobby, and was happy “The Postcard Man” decided to strike York County.
With thousands of postcards mailed, Joerg’s letters follow a similar formula. He often concludes his correspondences with a tagline he’s given the five-decade old hobby.
“I like to call my hobby a redistribution of happiness,” Joerg wrote in his letter. “Our world sure needs it.”
A county landmark
The courthouse is two-story yellow brick building built in 1914 on the corner of West Liberty and South Congress streets in York. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1981.
Bryant said the courthouse sat vacant “for a very long time” and needed extensive repairs and renovations to bring it to compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act.
The county council opted to repair the old courthouse rather than constructing a new one. Renovations on the historic courthouse began in 2014, the year of the building’s 100th birthday.
Special teams went in and removed asbestos, mold and lead paint before renovations began.
Builders added a new entrance, parking, offices and two new elevators. Two courtrooms were constructed, and the main courtroom was extensively renovated.
“It was a big undertaking,” Bryant said. “It really is a beautiful building.”
The courthouse celebrated its grand reopening three years later. It was once again a functional courthouse until the HVAC system failed in 2025. Employees were moved out by June 1 of that year.
The old courtroom’s ceiling will be replaced to make room for the new air conditioning system. Bryant said further repairs should be finished by 2027.
“It’ll be bigger and better for the county to have for years and years,” she said.
Bryant said she didn’t open the letter, but was overjoyed once she received it. She wrote in a Facebook post that the court doesn’t always receive positive mail.
“It brought tears to my eyes,” Bryant said. “It’s very meaningful.”
