streetscape in a small town c1908. location and photographer unknown.
Toronto. The old landscapes and streetscapes bring visions of history that no one can see in any other way. Years ago, at one of our fairs, I bought some glass plates from Marlene Cook. Most of the exposed plates came in a paper wrapper annotated by the original owner.
One glass plate negative (reversed here and adjusted slightly for exposure and contrast) was this street scene. The location and photographer go unnamed as does the full date, street, camera, etc.
The photographer does identify the date as sometime around 1908 – over a century ago. This seems right since the poles are telephone poles and the telephone by then was nearly three decades old – and there is no car in sight, but the street seems to have tire tracks (suggesting a small town where mobile technology hasn’t yet fully materialized). The multi-storey buildings suggest it is a street in a town rather than a village. The naked trees, muddy street, and little bits of snow say it’s early spring.
Being curious by nature, I enlarged a portion of the negative and to my surprise I saw two people in a small horse-drawn carriage plus a number of others using “shank’s pony” (that is, walking – my dad used this term when I was a kid). One large house even has fowl in the yard by the street.
Without the photographer taking this streetscape, we might have had little idea of how our ancestors lived. I bought the plate so I would have an example of exposed glass plates and ended up learning a bit about history.
