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For postcard collectors, it’s not about the words. It’s the images that count.

“I never read the messages on the cards,” said Christine Layne, a Greensboro collector. “I just like the way they look. I just go for the pictures on the cards.”

Layne and others like her see vintage postcards as windows to the past.

“They are a record on our community,” said Benjamin Briggs, executive director of Preservation Greensboro. “They are a document of what our community looked like at various points in time. In that sense, they are just as important as pictorial images.”

And no collection of postcards has become more important in North Carolina than the one that belonged to M. Durwood Barbour, a retiree from Raleigh.

In late 2006, Barbour gave UNC-Chapel Hill the majority of his postcard collection — 7,894 images from across the state.

“It’s like holding a piece of history,” said Barbour, 80, a former state highway engineer. “That’s the explanation a lot of people who collect will give you.”

Barbour collected the cards, appraised at $178,000, over 25 years.

“It is an incredible act of generosity,” said Bob Anthony, curator of the university’s North Carolina Collection, where the postcard collection is housed. “He could have ... gotten a good bit for them.”

The Barbour postcards have been added to the 4,000 postcards the North Carolina Collection already owned.

Collections like Barbour’s, and several hundred images at the Greensboro Historical Museum, capture life in North Carolina during the first half of the 1900s.

The “views,” as they were called, mostly featured street scenes, landmarks, major buildings, homes, public gatherings and businesses.

Barbour’s collection dates primarily from 1905 to the early 1950s.

It includes scenes of beach-goers in bathing costumes at Wrightsville Beach around the turn of the century, church members on a river bank near Asheville watching a baptism in 1913, and a crowd standing by as a fire destroyed Avalon Mill in Rockingham County in 1911.

“He had an eye for collecting the unusual,” Steve Massengill, a former employee of the North Carolina State Archives in Raleigh, said in a news release. “Lots of research can be pulled from this massive collection.”

It includes postcards from all 100 counties and almost every community from Aberdeen to Zionville. There are more than 160 views from Guilford County.

There’s a postcard of a gold mine near High Point, White Oak Mill in Greensboro, and street scenes in Gibsonville and Jamestown.

There are images of buildings that have long since been torn down, including the original O. Henry Hotel downtown.

One of Barbour’s favorites from Guilford shows a streetcar in Greensboro that carries a sign announcing a baseball game that day. He paid $45 for it, and it would probably bring $150 today, Barbour said. “It was the subject matter,” he said. “And I always like something with some activity going on.”

Some of the postcards have been colorized. In one case, the card maker used color to turn a daytime photo of Main Street in High Point into a nighttime scene. In other cases, the same car or building would be one color on one postcard and a different color on another.

“Nobody likes colored ones,” said Layne, whose collection includes more than 500 black-and-white images of Greensboro. “They just don’t look natural-looking.”

Barbour said he decided to donate his collection for several reasons.

“It got to the point where I wasn’t being productive in finding anything anymore,” he said. “It was getting more expensive, and I was getting on in age. I said, 'I can’t keep doing this.’”

He said he’s glad the cards are being digitized and put online for others to enjoy. Nearly 3,000 have been posted.

“I feel perfectly satisfied with where (the collection) is,” Barbour said. “I feel like my babies are being looked after.”

Contact Donald W. Patterson at 373-7027 or don.patterson@news-record.com