Rob- my thoughts about it are pretty much what you said. Some retailer ordered a large group of these around 1910, let's say 1000 is a reasonable number, and started giving them out to customers at point of purchase. And not too far into it he gave up. Maybe he went out of business. Maybe it became too much of a nuisance. Maybe kids kept coming into the store asking for the cards without buying anything. Whatever the reason, the merchant took the remaining 750 cards, virtually all pristine and unused, put them neatly in a box, and threw them into his attic.
And I'm sure he was not the only one to do this. All over the country, for whatever reason, unused promotional cards went into storage. But what is so extraordinary about these is they survived for more than a century without being thrown out. The family never moved. They never cleaned out the attic. They didn't find the cards in 1960, and decide to sell them then because somebody offered the princely sum of $100 for them. They survived forever. Imagine selling a house to somebody and inadvertently leaving a million dollars in the attic? Well somebody did exactly that.
My story is pure speculation but I bet it's also not that far from what actually happened. And the new buyers of the house not only got a home but a winning lottery ticket thrown in for good measure. What an amazing story.
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