This postcard felt like a Sudoku with several key numbers missing. The context seemed so easy to find. It's a clear image of a specific house, sent on a specific date from a stated part of town and signed by someone who gives their relationship to the named recipient. And yet the photo has almost no contextual details. It's a whole section of town that has bulldozed by highways in multiple places in the intervening 100 years. And the handwriting is so bad that every word just might be some other word.

The impossibility of it all became pretty clear early on and yet somehow I eventually came across an article in a Minnesota Norwegian newspaper from October 6, 1910 that, according to Google translate, reads:

Laying the foundation stone: On Sunday, January 7th, the foundation stone was laid for Our Savior's Lutheran Church on E. 123rd Street in New York. Present were Reverends Everson, Ellertson, Tietrichson, Retersen, Schoenfeld, and the parish priest, Reverend J. C. Gram. Several hundred people had come to celebrate the occasion. Reverend Everson gave the keynote address and laid the foundation stone, assisted by the priests present. The foundation stone itself is a gift from the Cathedral of Trondheim and symbolizes the Norwegian Church translated into America. The foundation stone has been part of the transept in St. John's Church. The celebration ended with Reverend Gram expressing heartfelt thanks to all present and especially to Architect Gade, a great friend and benefactor of the parish who was also present. Architect Gade received a rich American, Miss Dorothy Whitney, to give the Congregation S15,000 for the completion of the new Church.
That article led to others, all in Norwegian. The recipient of the postcard, Reverend J.C. Gram, seems to have been a Lutheran pastor who worked around rural parts of Northeast Minnesota before finding himself in Manhattan. Although the Norwegian newspaper articles only discuss his congregations in small Minnesota settlements like Akely and Buzzle, he must have spent some time in the city because his sibling wasn't the only one sending the family postcards from West Duluth.

The church is still there in East Harlem, now a Spanish Seventh-Day Adventist Church. The only information that I could find online was its year of construction. So this post of a West Duluth house may have just become the most complete historical record available online of a Manhattan church.
  

Searching the Duluth Herald clears up the parsing of the sentence in that notice. Margaret was visiting two uncles, M. C. Albeson and W. E. Kern. The Kerns lived at 4809 W. Sixth St. The address of Magnes Conrad Albeson is not given. Since he wrote the postcard labelled "our home," his address in 1910 should be the address of the home shown, but that is not information that I am able to find.

Okay, I think I have it figured out, mostly. According to the Find a Grave site, J.C. Gram's wife was Caroline Mathilde Alveson Gram. This matches Mike Flaherty's other find that her mother was Mrs. M. Alveson. So Alveson was her maiden name. Her brother, therefore was not Magnes Albeson but Magnus Alverson (likely a typo in the paper -- twice) who was writing to his brother-in-law. Magnus Alverson lived next door to his and Caroline's mother, at 6113 Olney St. (so that first guess of 6109 Olney Street was actually incredibly close). There is no house assigned to the number 6113 and 6115 Olney is listed as being built in 1931. It may be a larger house built on the site of 6113 Olney, but the attached notice is the only record I could find of a 6113 Onley ever having existed, so I feel a bit uncertain about the address. But the fact that it is next door to his mother's home takes away some of that uncertainty.
  

And as I soon as I posted, I saw that Gina and I were coming to the same conclusions at the same time. Although I didn't find the Duluth Tent and Awning connection. That actually adds quite a bit of context to the photo.

That all makes sense. And it clears up something else that was confusing me a bit. While 6113 Olney only appears once in the newspaper archives and is likely a mistake, 6111 Olney appears quite a few times. But the same people are often listed as also living at 6109 Olney at around the same time. Which implies that the house may have had a second entrance or been subdivided, with the address sometimes given as 6111 Olney. In any event, it does seem that there was only one Alveson house, not three, and it likely was destroyed by fire in 1927. 

I've attached the address listings, the obituary of Mary Kern that gives a good description of how the Kern's, Alveson's and Gram's all related to each other, and a picture of some freak antlers on a deer that Ernest Alveson shot. 

This is just speculation, but Ernest worked at the West Duluth post office around the time that this custom postcard was sent from the West Duluth post office. I suspect that he may have been the creator of this and possibly the other similar postcards, if not the photographer.
  

Those are some good concluding details. So it's a photo of the house at 6109 Olney St. where the family that started Duluth Tent & Awning lived, taken a year before they bought the Duluth Pack design from C. Poirier. 

The postcard was written by Magnus Alveson, one of the founding members of the company who had previous experience working with awnings. 

And two years after the family business started, he sent the postcard to his brother-in-law, a Lutheran minister who had served various congregations in Northern Minnesota but recently found work at a new church in Manhattan.

The family house was likely destroyed by fire in 1927. The packs are still made in the same shop on Superior Street.
  

Ha - that's nice. I certainly did enjoy being part of the group effort. But anyone coming across this later shouldn't feel left out. There is still work to be done. Namely a single word on the postcard that looks half-legible and yet remains indecipherable. Whatever it is, it has again become famous. I'm going to choose to believe that Magnus was writing about the renewed popularity of his favorite color.
 

'My little cow' is certainly the most reasonable interpretation that I have seen so far. And just from a brief review of the word 'cow' in the papers around that time, it was definitely an era where it was possible for a cow to become famous again.