Newton Upper Falls

Dear Aunt Harriet

Hope this your birthday finds you well and happy with many more.

Best wishes

Ernest

A group of views from a village within the boundaries of the town of Newton, Massachusetts, a few miles west of Boston. As one might suppose, there is also a Newton Lower Falls, but the town includes Newton Centre, Newton Corner, Newton Highlands, Newtonville, and West Newton as well, along with several villages that don't include the name Newton in any form. The stream is the Charles River.

The images below are not identical, though they both originated from the same photographic negative. If you look carefully there are differences in coloring and cropping, which are most evident along the bottom border and in the bushes in the left and right foreground.


Do you have anything like this in Seattle

Ed.

Our Story So Far (II)

Above, Weary & Kramer's 1893 Christ Methodist Episcopal Church (now the First United Methodist Church) in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The building, which replaced an earlier church structure destroyed by fire, still stands, though recent photographs show no sign of the ivy. Below, some brief and very amateur thoughts on the historical uses of Rotograph's output of scenic view cards.

Dissertations could no doubt be written (and in fact, at least a few have been written) about postcards as an early form of social media (one often derided by traditionalists of the day as a trivialized and mass-marketed substitute for proper letter-writing), about what images were produced and why, and about the place of scenic views within the history of photography and modern art. Another body of potential historical evidence can be found in the messages that were written on the cards, which, while they tend to the banal and formulaic, sometimes illuminate tiny corners of interest to the microhistorian, as well as broader trends, like immigration, as in the example below, which was posted to a Norwegian-American woman.


On the most superficial level, of course, Rotograph's archive of thousands of images preserves a record of how the country appeared a century or so ago, but the fact is that most of what we see in them is amply documented elsewhere. Unlike Real Photo postcards, which sometimes captured unique images of ordinary life and events both profound and trivial, Rotograph's views tended to concentrate on those aspects of life that were most public and unchanging, at least from one day to the next: monuments, bridges, schools, churches, office buildings, parks, beaches, hotels, and so on. They were scenes that the purchaser might want to preserve as souvenirs, or share with others who lived at a distance (though postcards were very often exchanged between correspondents who lived no more than a few miles apart), but they did not in themselves reveal anything to those who were already familiar with the locations they depicted.


Cities and towns grow, but they also decay; often, they do both simultaneously, as one form of urbanization supplants another. Most buildings have lifetimes -- sometimes surprisingly short ones -- and only the most indispensable or symbolically significant structures are likely to be preserved indefinitely. A high percentage of the inns and resorts shown in Rotograph's views of New England, for instance, were lost to fire, often within a generation or two of their construction -- but recognizing this immediately raises the question of why many were not replaced. This negative evidence, the absence of these structures today, may be traceable to shifts in vacation patterns due to the rise of the automobile and the roadside motel.


The disappearance of some structures, like Hammatt Billings's canopy over Plymouth Rock (above), accompanied shifting fashions in aesthetics and public taste, while other absences -- buildings once regarded as assets that were later demolished as liabilities -- may be linked to demography or to changing patterns in the use and management of public space. The survival of certain buildings, like the "casino" below (really more of a recreation hall and sometime theatre) may speak to the relative immunity to change of favored enclaves like Nantucket Island.


To me, however, the aspect that is of greatest interest is cumulative, and comparative. Looking at an array of these images in succession and in juxtaposition, we see a world that is partly familiar but partly radically different. Manhattan, for example, has changed dramatically in the past hundred years, but most of its essential qualities of size, infrastructure, economic and political function, ethnic diversity, and so on were already firmly established by the first decade of the twentieth century.


From the perspective of a hundred years we see the changes, but from an even longer perspective there are equally significant continuities. New York is, as it was then, a busy, dense megalopolis where millions of people of different classes and backgrounds live, work, study, shop, fight, love, and die. When we look at the city a hundred years ago we are, in a real sense, looking at ourselves, but in a way that highlights both what we share and don't share with those who came before us.

Our Story So Far (I)

[This project, while not completed (it is in fact meant to be open-ended) has reached a point where it can be considered established, and I plan to add new material far more sporadically in the future so that I can return to other endeavors. Below is the first installment of a two-part overview of some of the interpretive aspects of the project. This post deals with aesthetic issues; the next will look at the use of Rotograph's work as historical evidence.]

The Rotograph Company produced tens of thousands of scenic views in its brief history. Its photographers -- whoever they may have been, since by and large their identities seem to be unrecorded -- captured engineering marvels of the day, from bridges and canals to skyscrapers; they documented the civic and religious buildings of small towns as well as the well-tended monuments with which Americans declared their connections to their own past; they depicted the seaside resorts and tourist traps of an early 20th-century America where increasing numbers of people went to taste the benefits of leisure time; above all, they preserved in material, visible form both the country's physical appearance and, equally important, evidence of how Americans conceived of the land they inhabited.


The archive of images that they created was broad and rich, but it was not unselective. In general, Rotograph's view cards show us little of factories and sweatshops, bars and missions, tenements and shantytowns, and much else that we know -- and that its audience knew -- was in fact present. Unlike Jacob Riis or the WPA photographers of the 1930s, the company did not deliberately set out to confront Americans with aspects of their country that were normally concealed or ignored. Nor were they carrying on the same task as the countless thousands of small-town professional photographers and amateur shutterbugs who, in the first decades of the twentieth century, preserved images of everything from family life to lynchings in continuous-tone "Real Photo" photographic postcards.

Without denying the active role that the company's photographers, printers, and management played in creating the images, in the end what was shot, printed, and distributed was determined, above all, by market considerations. But acknowledging that fact inevitably leads to the question -- which I will not attempt to answer but do intend to raise -- of why the market wanted certain things: what scenes of their country were Americans interested in seeing, and how did they want them to be depicted?


The postcard boom of the early 20th century paralleled the flowering of other forms of popular art and entertainment that were affordable to all but the poorest Americans, from the newspaper comic to the motion picture and the phonograph record. Although tintypes, cartes de visite, and other inexpensive photographic media had been available for decades, the rise of the postcard greatly expanded the inventory of images that could be manufactured, distributed, and exchanged. This project has only been concerned with scenic view cards, but the postcard format was adaptable to everything from salacious humor to sentimentality to reproductions of fine artworks that would normally only be seen by those with access to the collections of one of the great metropolitan museums.

The mass production of postcard images by lithographic screen processes, rather than by continuous-tone true photographic printing, entailed certain limitations. The crucial one, from the perspective of this project, was the matter of color. The challenge lay not so much in printing color per se as in reproducing the richness and subtleties of color that were encountered in the real world. Despite some promising early experiments, mass-produced true-color photographic reproduction was not yet feasible.


In response, postcard manufacturers developed a workaround. They would not attempt to directly employ the output of the camera lens as a medium for transferring information about real-world coloration to the finished project. Instead, they would start from a black-and-white original and artificially introduce appropriate pigmentation during the printing process. When done crudely and cheaply, the results were unimpressive, but in skillful hands the resulting images could be, if not fully true-to-life, satisfactorily pleasing to the eye. The ultimate goal, let us remind ourselves, was to entice a buyer.

But something odd happens here. Photographic images that might have seemed utterly pedestrian in black-and-white took on an extra dimension when carefully printed in color (or when colored wholly or partly by hand, as some Rotographs were). Coloring did more than restore natural hues; it created artificial objects with supernormal aesthetic qualities of their own. The great accomplishment of the coloring process lay not in better capturing the real world but in creating a different one.


Photography is, of course, an artistic genre, and a photograph, if taken with any kind of attention, is always more than a passive reflection of its subject. Even photographers with proclaimed "documentary" intentions are guided, to a greater or lesser degree, by aesthetic principles. But by applying a second level of artistic intervention to the original photograph, Rotograph's printers created hybrid images in which more than one strata of artistic activity could be seen to be at work. The finished postcards were documentary, because they were constrained by the real world that was present to be filtered through the photographer's lens, but they were also imaginary, because they had been manipulated in ways that corresponded both to notions of what coloring was appropriately natural and to judgments about what would be pleasing to the eye.

This manipulation -- which, I might add, anticipated the use of hybrid, "impure," artistic techniques like André Breton's collages, the incorporation of "found" objects and textures in the constructions of Joseph Cornell, and Andy Warhol's Pop Art employment of photographs as a base for silk-screened prints, to cite just a few examples -- produced artworks that were aesthetically irreducible. That is, it's impossible to casually dismiss them as nothing but kitsch created to satisfy a particular market fad and to flatter the self-image of the buyers, who were largely American citizens with a vested interest in beholding images of the country that reinforced a certain national ideology. The cards may indeed have been all that, but they also had an additional dimension, a disruptive strangeness, that may have been invisible to those who created and purchased them.


Looking at these postcards now, hopefully with a minimum of nostalgia, we miss much of the original context of associations that would have been familiar to their original creators and beholders, but in exchange we are able to see them through the perspective of subsequent artistic, technological, and historical developments, and we can see how technical limitations and the constraints of the market prompted creative solutions that can be encompassed within the broader history of producing -- and regarding -- art during the past one hundred years.

All of which is perhaps only a long-winded and abstruse way of saying that the artistic possibilities opened up by these images have not necessarily been followed to their exhaustion.

Ancestors

Shown above is the so-called "Conus" of Marietta, Ohio, one of the hundreds if not thousands of substantial mounds and other earthworks built by the inhabitants of eastern North Americans before the arrival of European settlers. Many of these sites were long ago ploughed under, but this one survives, in part because of its sheltered location in a cemetery, and in part because, according to archaeologist George R. Milner, the town's citizens made a point of preserving it.

Over a century and a half ago, Ephraim Squier and Edwin Davis singled out the citizens of Marietta for special praise for preserving their mounds, while lamenting the loss of what would have been "striking ornaments" in other cities. In fact, the early settlers of Marietta were so proud of their mounds that they dignified them with Latin names.

Squier and Davis were the pioneering archaeologists whose 1848 report for the Smithsonian Institution, Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley, provided the first scientific survey of the earthworks. Like many of their contemporaries, they assumed them to be the work of some vanished people, since the region's Indians were deemed too "primitive" to be capable of such accomplishments. George R. Milner's The Moundbuilders: Ancient Peoples of North America (W. W. Norton, 2004) is a good recent overview.


Despite the inscription on the postcard above, the Standing Stone Monument in Huntingdon, Pennsylvania is not "an Indian relic" but a memorial to a relic. A history of the monument can be found in the Handbook of American Indians North of Mexico (1910).

A famous Indian landmark on the right bank of a creek of the same name, on the Kittanning trail, at the site of the present Huntingdon, Huntingdon Co., Pa. The "standing stone" is described by John Harris (1754) as being 14 ft high and 6 in. square, and covered with Indian pictographs. It was highly venerated by the Indians, and is supposed to have been erected by one of the tribes of the Iroquois. After the treaty of 1754 the stone was carried away by the Indians. A similar one was erected on the same spot, which soon became covered with the names and initials of the Indian traders who passed by...

Rev. Dr William Smith, provost of the University of Pennsylvania, laid out a town on the site of Standing Stone in 1767, to which he gave the name of Huntingdon, in honor of Selina, Countess of Huntingdon (England), who had made a gift to the university. The old name, however, clung to the place for years afterward. Nearly all the traders and military officers of the 18th century use the old name.

The Handbook doesn't mention that the second stone was eventually destroyed (a piece is said to have been relocated to the Huntingdon County Courthouse). The third-generation monument shown in the postcard was erected in 1896 as part of a centennial commemoration of the incorporation of the Borough of Huntingdon. The fate of the original stone, with its mysterious "pictographs," is unknown. The recipient of the Standing Stone postcard, incidentally, was one Forney Gilliam of Ardmore, Indian Territories (now Oklahoma). Gilliam seems to have operated a small store in Ardmore; his solicitation for magazine subscriptions can be found in the Daily Ardmoreite for November 19, 1906. Either as part of his business or as a hobby (quite likely both), he appears to have been a quite active exchanger of postcards. (He also published at least one, a crudely printed black-and-white view of the Ardmore's Main Street.)


Finally, above is "the Devil's Den," a rock ledge in Newton Upper Falls, Massachusetts, which one source indicates was believed to have been used by Indians as a place to store dried fish. There must be countless numbers of sites in the US with an equally hazy folk memory of use by the original inhabitants of the land. There are a number of other Rotographs of Newton Upper Falls, so perhaps they will be the subject of a future post.

The inscription, by the way, reads "Serg't I wish you would try and Send me Perry's Address he is a former member of your Co and a very good friend of mine. Sergt Regan." It was mailed to a Serg't E. R. Gross in Attleboro, Mass.

The Strange Afterlife of Henry W. Shaw

Sometimes the most unpromising artifacts turn out to be the ones with the weirdest stories attached to them, and the postcard above is a prime example. I imagine that the name Josh Billings will draw as much of a blank with most people today as it did with me, but two things could be immediately deduced from the caption: that he was once a person of some renown, and that he wasn't really named "Josh Billings." In fact, "Billings" was born Henry Wheeler Shaw in Lanesboro, Massachusetts in 1818. He came from a distinguished political family but after a checkered career settled into journalism, a profession at which he became successful enough that he was photographed in the company of two pseudonymous peers, one a certain Petroleum V. Nasby, now largely forgotten, the other a man who went by the name of Twain. He was known for his pithy "witticisms," many of them in dialect, one of which ("I don't rekoleckt now ov ever hearing ov two dogs fiteing unless thare waz a man or two around") turned out to be singularly unfortunate, given what is reputed to be Shaw's eventual fate.

Shaw died in 1885 in Monterey, California, and as the postcard below indicates, was interred near his birthplace. At least most of him was.


According to a bit of Monterey lore that John Steinbeck worked into Cannery Row, when Shaw died, the local doctor, who apparently also served as an undertaker, removed some of his internal organs during the embalming process and unceremoniously flung the tripas into a nearby gulch, where they were discovered a boy looking for fishbait -- and by his dog, whom Steinbeck describes as dragging "yards of intestines on the ends of which a stomach dangled."

When some of the local citizens heard of this discovery, and simultaneously learned of the death of "Josh Billings" at the nearby Hotel del Monte, they quickly put two and two together and hastily summoned the doctor.

They made him dress quickly then and they hurried down to the beach. If the little boy had gone quickly about his business, it would have been too late. He was just getting into a boat when the committee arrived. The intestine was in the sand where the dog had abandoned it.

Then the French doctor was made to collect the parts. He was forced to wash them reverently and pick out as much sand as possible. The doctor himself had to stand the expense of the leaden box which went into the coffin of Josh Billings. For Monterey was not a town to let dishonor come to a literary man.

What Steinbeck's source for this gruesome incident was, and whether there was any truth in it, I don't know (it recalls a similar, and also possibly apocryphal, story about Thomas Hardy's heart and a cat), but true or not I suspect that Steinbeck's retelling of it has probably done more to preserve the name of Josh Billings than anything the latter ever penned.

"Hillcrest," Shaw's birthplace, was operated as an inn for a period during the first half of the 20th century. I haven't been able to find out whether it still stands and if so whether it is still regarded as a local landmark.

The Erie Canal

The construction of the Erie Canal was one of the key engineering and political accomplishments of the nineteenth century, so it's no surprise that Rotograph's photographers captured many scenes of its 363-mile passage through a varied landscape of rural areas, city centers, and industrial zones. Most of the images below, which I have arranged in rough geographical order from east to west, are from Postcards from the New York Waterways: 1898-1923, an admirable online project created by the Queens College School of Library Science. [Unfortunately, as of March 2013, the project seems to have vanished.] An additional archive of images is housed at eriecanal.org.

The moon, a hat, and a waterfall

A likely Rotograph production based on the typography and design, though the publisher's name on the back is given as H. H. Jackson, Bridgeport, Conn., this card sports some extra doodles, possibly in the hand of the anonymous sender. The addressee is Mr. Ralph Tiffany of 59 Bancroft St., Springfield, Mass.

"Hope to see you this Summer." Haven't heard from you in such a long time though[t] I would write a line or two, and see if you were dead or alive.

According to the Metropolitan Postcard Club website, H. H. Jackson was known for postcards depicting Buffalo Bill's Wild West show. The American Stationer reports that he retired in 1913 after thirty-one years and sold his book and stationery business to two other men. Below is another Bridgeport view bearing his imprint on the back, and in this case, the words Copyright 1905 by the Rotograph Co. on the front as well.

Keep Your Powder Dry

These two structures, the one above from Marblehead, Massachusetts and the one below from Somerville in the same state, are 18th-century powder houses, once used for storing gunpowder and firearms. The onion-domed Marblehead building was built for that purpose in the 1750s, but the Somerville tower from 1703 or 1704, which looks like it could be employed as a projectile itself, was originally a mill. Both still stand.


The design and location of powder houses reflected the need to keep explosive materials safely away from other structures and the general population, but the buildings also came to have a political role. On September 1, 1774, at the order of British General Thomas Gage, who was jittery about leaving munitions under the control of restive Patriots, the Somerville powder house was raided by British troops and largely emptied out, and as reports of the incident spread, mixed with a fair amount of misinformation, armed Patriots descended on Cambridge and Boston in response. Though the "Powder Alarm" quickly abated, it prefigured the outbreak of war at Lexington and Concord the following spring.

There are a handful of other existing powder houses in Massachusetts, including examples at Newburyport (near Salem) and a frequently vandalized one at Amesbury, but most date from the first half of the 19th century. Thus far I haven't come across any record that the Rotograph Co. created images of any of these others, though some of their competitors did so.

Great Barrington

After having spent considerable time dipping our toes in the waters along the Massachusetts seashore, we move to one of the chief towns of the Berkshires in the western part of the state. The monument above, which refers to a 1774 protest by some 1,500 citizens against the so-called Intolerable Acts, is said to still stand outside the Great Barrington Town Hall, below.


According to Gary Leveille's Around Great Barrington (Arcadia Publishing, 2011), the Berkshire Inn, above, "was considered one of the most impressive structures in all of Berkshire County." Originally built in 1892 and subsequently expanded, it was demolished in the aftermath of a 1965 fire. The treatment of the trees in particular in this postcard seems more painterly than photographic, and the architecture of the partially obscured wing at right seems almost Japanese in inspiration.

The postcards above are good examples of Rotograph's high-quality printing, even if the view of the Berkshire Inn is a bit awkwardly framed. The same can't be said for the unfortunate image below, with its crude, arbitrary blotches of rust. It was published by Rotograph as well, but perhaps this was a budget line.

Cryptorotographs

According to one account of the sale of the Rotograph Co. in 1911, the company's archives housed more than two million photographic images, only a small percentage of which were ever printed as postcards. That total presumably included the images that had been captured by photographers for the National Art Views Company, a short-lived predecessor that Rotograph had acquired in 1904, but many other new views were probably shot during Rotograph's heyday. Thus far I've found no information on the identities of the company's photographers, though such information may exist. Perhaps, like today's surveyors for Google Street View, they quietly went about their business as they roamed cities and small towns, unobtrusively snapping anything they thought might be marketable.

But there's an additional category of work that Rotograph handled, and that was the output of local professional or amateur photographers whose images were printed by Rotograph (or by its affiliated factories in Germany) and sold under proprietary names by druggists, stationers, and other small businesses, often in towns that were small in size or off the beaten path. These images might not bear the Rotograph name, but they can often be at least tentatively identified by diagnostic design elements, in particular the typeface employed.

That Rotograph (and its competitors) did this kind of work is clear from contemporary advertisements. Allen Freeman Davis refers to one such ad in his Postcards from Vermont: a Social History, 1905-1945:

The Rotograph Company of New York, which also published Vermont view cards, advertised that they could have cards printed in Germany at the cost of nine dollars a thousand if at least 3,000 of any subject were ordered. "We require good sharp photographs," the ad announced. "It is very necessary when ordering colored cards to give the color scheme." The company promised delivery in three to five months.

In addition to the choice between monochrome and color (and possibly, how many colors were to be printed, since each additional color would require an additional plate and therefore additional expense) the quality of the finished product, of course, would depend on the skill of the photographer, as well as on communication between the buyer and the printer. For nature scenes a standard palette of colors might serve, but for buildings the printer would have to be told what colors were true to the actual paint on the structures.

Below are several cards likely to have been printed by Rotograph, though they were "published" by local businesses. (The Rotograph Co., incidentally, published other views of some of the same towns using its regular trademark.) All except the last are from towns in the Catskills that were popular resort areas in spite of their small year-round population. The first two (as well as the card at the top of this page, with its misspelling of "queitude") were issued by J. Fahrenholz in Liberty, NY and postmarked in 1907 or 1908.


The next card, also from Liberty, was published by H. M. Stoddard & Son of nearby Stevensville, NY.


The one below was published by the Foyette Souvenir Store, also in Stevensville.


Finally, a postcard from E[dward] Farrington of Tarrytown, NY, whose later activity as a postcard publisher has been examined by Lucas Buresch at Archive Sleuth.


All of the above share the same Art Nouveau-inspired typeface employed by the Rotograph Co.(there must be someone out there who can identify it by name), with a characteristic florid capital "Y." Rotograph used other typefaces as well, so there may well be substantial numbers of additional "cryptorotographs" out there that aren't as instantly recognizable.

All of the cards from the Catskills show here were mailed to the same family, the subject of my earlier post at Dreamers Rise.