This is a great card from Gilbert, Arizona ! My first thought when I saw the name was that Gilbert must be a small, possibly declining town of a few hundred people. Since it’s in Arizona, I imagined it might have been a mining community that began to fade after the mine closed. However, Gilbert is actually a suburb of Phoenix and has a population of nearly 300,000. The last time the town had only a few hundred residents was around the 1940 census. In the 1980s, Gilbert experienced a population boom. Between 1980 and 1990, the population grew from 5,717 to nearly 30,000. By 2000, it had reached almost 110,000—an increase of more than 400% in just a decade. There was no mine. William Gilbert , the town’s namesake, provided land to the Arizona Eastern Railway in 1902 to build a line between Phoenix and Florence. Settlers, including members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints , moved into the area, including some who had left Mexico during unrest associated with Pancho Vil...