Many of the items in the Chattanooga, Lookout Mountain, and Chickamauga Battlefield postcards collections were published by the Detroit Publishing Company, which held exclusive rights to Photocrom, a photograph processing technique that allowed the company to mass produce color postcards. The company was founded in the late 1800s by William A. Livingstone and photographer Edwin H. Husher, but did not call itself the Detroit Publishing Company until 1905. The company declared bankruptcy in 1924 and was liquidated in 1932.

Other postcards in the collection were published by the W.M. Cline Company, a Chattanooga, Tennessee enterprise established in 1938 by Walter Matson Cline, Jr. who took over the family business, Cline Studios. Cline Studios produced photographs for local newspapers and advterisers, and in 1938, Cline began published postcards using the images taken by his father and himself. In 1958, Cline opened a color plant. The company stopped producing postcards in the 1960s or 1970s.