Company Town

This one's been sitting in my thrown-in pile of photos for a long time, but after scanning and blowing it up, I'm not so sure I filed it correctly.  Yes, the woman is interesting, but it was the background that has made me question my original opinion.  I grew up in coal and steel country in western Pennsylvania, and when I was a child, it didn't take long to learn the difference between a small town and a company town. 

The classic company town  was built by the coal mine or the steel mill as housing for it's workers.  Most of the houses looked pretty much alike, rent was deducted from your paycheck, and as long as you were a worker in good standing with the company, you had a home.  If you got fired or quite, you were expected to move out in a day or two.  If you went on strike, you'd get evicted.  For some companies, retirement brought a small pension that included your home.  For others, retirement required having a son who went into the mills or mines who took over your home and allowed you to stick around. 

Some company towns were little more than rural slums, while others were quite nice.  I've been in coal towns were the houses were simple, wood frame affairs, that even when they were new, offered little more than dry place in the winter.  Vandergrift, a town not too far from where I grew up was designed by Olmsted, Olmsted, and Eliot, the same firm that designed New York City's Central Park.  In the end, most of the mills and mines let housing go as a benefit and sold all the houses off.  And if you didn't have the money, well the mine was more than willing to float a lone at an extremely high rate of interest.

So, the houses in the background look similar enough that they could have all been built for company housing, and in most company towns, one house could only be distinguished from another by the street number near the front door. 

Small Town, Small Photograph

This photo is just a bit over one inch long, and appears to have been cut from a larger image.  Late nineteenth, early twentieth century would be a good bet.

The Green Album 9

In an earlier post I noted that I had purchased this album off of eBay and it had come from somewhere in the mid-west.  I couldn't remember exactly where, but was sure it wasn't from California.   Despite that, I was also sure that the beach pictures were from California.  So, where those photos vacation pics?  Maybe, maybe not.  The mid-west is quite flat, but a photo on this page, and on some of the other pages, has a very distinct ridge line in the background.  My guess is that the pictures from page three on are from a small town somewhere in the San Joaquin Valley of central California,  or one of the suburbs of Los Angeles.  Back then, and I'm pretty sure that this album is from the World War 2 era, a lot of L.A. suburbs were more small farm town than bedroom.community.  Photos and photo albums travel.

As usual, click on The Green Album to see more.

Small Town Glass Negatives

A couple of glass negatives, one I wanted, and one was the throw in. I've always assumed that these two images, if not by the same photographer, were at least from the same small town. While glass negatives were manufactured, and processed by local labs, many glass negatives were made by the photographer, and processed by the photographer. This allowed for a huge disparity in the basic quality of negatives. I printed these by putting them in an 8 x 10 enlarger, and had a hell of a time getting usable prints. The emulsion was uneven, and the plates were over exposed. I assume that the group photo is a multi-generational family, and while this is the image I was really interested in, it is interesting to see a small town before paved streets.