If you did not know better, the 1912 postcard looks like proof that an electric streetcar once rolled through downtown New Glarus.

The camera is looking north along 2nd Street from roughly the area of 5th Avenue. A horse and buggy occupies the street, storefronts crowd the business district, utility poles and wires line the roadway, and a single smokestack rises in the distance. On the right is a streetcar, apparently traveling on rails that continue up 2nd Street and disappear into the village.

There is only one problem: New Glarus never had a streetcar.

The postcard was sold as a novelty. Its maker used the photographic technology of the day to place a trolley into a real New Glarus street scene and then went further, adding tracks that make the fiction seem part of the landscape. More than a century later, the result is still convincing enough to make a viewer stop and wonder whether a forgotten chapter of local transportation history has somehow been hiding in plain sight.