Seeing the Past

@garydavidplummer.bsky.social

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Gary David Plummer: Retired journalist and writer and editor with a background in American history; Middling black & white photographer; Researcher of coal-mining history in a Western Pennsylvania community. [ Please read the ALT text on photographs ]

Russell Lee captured a busy day on Manhattan’s Eighth Avenue in November 1936. Taxicabs and trucks jam the street, workers unload a wagon, a vendor sells from his cart and the avenue’s namesake cafeteria beckons across the avenue.
Independence man: A resident of Polk County, Oregon, hangs out on Main Street in the town of Independence. Dorothea Lange photographed the hop harvest in the area in August 1939. Near the man is a sign advertising the annual four-day “Hop Fiesta,” including an amateur hour, street dance, acrobats, log rolling and aquaplaning. He stands next to a Pulver chewing gum dispenser; for one cent, “delivers a tasty chew.”
Louisiana ladies: Two young women sit on a stoop in Amite City, Louisiana, in October 1935. The woman on the left does the nails of the other woman, who stares at the camera with her chin on her hand. Ben Shahn made the photograph.
Drugstore dominoes: Four men mind their dominoes at a makeshift table outside a drugstore in Mississippi Delta, Mississippi, in October 1939. Two observers, one on a bench at the left and the other with a tie, wire-rim glasses and a pen in his shirt pocket, observe the play closely. The players’ metal chairs appear to be borrowed from a soda fountain in the drugstore. Marion Post Wolcott made the photograph.
Yacht pen: John Vachon photographed a group of pleasure boats in an inlet at Little Creek, Delaware, a fishing village near the state capital of Dover. Several of the sailing vessels sport tall masts. On the right of the image, a man prepares to push his boat off from a rickety dock.
Smithy’s tools: Designed to assist hard-hit tenant farmers to become landowners, the Skyline Farms project in Alabama was a New Deal program of the Resettlement Administration, which became the Farm Security Administration. Ben Shahn photographed the project in 1937. The image shows the wall of a blacksmith shop with various tools. A Resettlement Administration poster on the wall says: "Rural slums on worn out land. Resettlement Administration is offering new opportunities to farmers.”
Vanishing point: Framed in darkness, Jack Delano’s photograph shows the view out the back of a caboose on the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railroad between Belen and Gallup, New Mexico. Delano rode the rails in the state in March 1943 to document the railroad’s operations in support of the war effort. The FSA/OWI records note that “This image (was) in a jacket marked ‘Killed.’"
At the “Temple of Knowledge” booth at the Louisiana State Fair in November 1938, Russell Lee immortalized fortune teller Stella May, identified by the small sign over her head. She wears a gypsy head scarf and holds a purse against her right hip, while her left hand grasps a sign promising “psychic life readings” and “authentic astrology” for 10 cents.
Young man and bicycle: A young Black man wearing a newsie cap sits with his bicycle outside a boarded-up building in Chicago’s “Black Belt.” The bike includes swept-back handlebars, a basket on the front and what looks like a canvas pannier on the back. Edwin Rosskam made the photograph in July 1941 while on assignment in Chicago.
Praise the Lord: Congregants of the Primitive Baptist Church line the left bank of a creek as the pastor and another church official prepare to conduct a baptismal ceremony in the creek. They stand in knee-deep water; the pastor has his right arm raised as he prays over the couple to be baptized by submersion. Marion Post Wolcott photographed the scene in August 1940 near Morehead, Kentucky.
Ad for upcoming acts at the Surf Ballroom, Clear Lake, Iowa, in 1934.
Girls just wanna have fun: In Arthur Rothstein’s photograph, two women sit at a table in a bar in Marshalltown, Iowa, in February 1940. Taking a break from dancing in the adjacent dance hall, they enjoy Coca-Cola, beer and Camels, perhaps planning to attend a performance by Huck Shaffer’s Band at Forest Park.
Jack Delano visited Mauch Chunk, in northeastern Pennsylvania, in August 1940, producing more than 120 negatives. The photograph shows one of the main streets in the town, captured in beautiful light with a large selection of parked vehicles. A building on the right side is labeled F.O.E,, for Fraternal Order of Eagles. The coal-mining and railroad town of Mauch Chunk was renamed Jim Thorpe in 1954 in honor of the native American athlete who was interred there the same year.
Failed farm: Wilbur Staats’s March 1937 photograph shows what’s left of an abandoned farm in Idaho. A derelict auto sits half-buried in dirt and sand in the foreground, its engine scavenged. Several men examine the windmill, with one having climbed to the platform to take a closer look. A fence line appears in the background, but there is no evidence of a dwelling.
Closing the border: Two Colorado National Guardsmen enforce martial law to prevent migrants from other states and Mexico from crossing the state’s southern border. With a tent for their barracks, they stand in the road, wearing sidearms, next to a sign declaring “STOP Martial Law.” According to the "Colorado Encyclopedia," “For ten days in 1936, Colorado governor Edwin ‘Big Ed’ Johnson declared martial law in the state, which allowed him to close Colorado’s southern border . . . Amid record unemployment during the Great Depression, Johnson closed the border because he feared an ‘invasion’ of 'alien and indigent persons’ who would take scarce jobs from white Coloradans.”
Cotton kingdom: Two brokers in Memphis, Tennessee, examine and grade the product in a room filled with cotton. Marion Post Wolcott made the photograph in November 1939.
Car stop: Gordon Parks photographed a woman waiting for a streetcar in Washington, D.C., in August 1942. Standing next to a “Car Stop” sign, she observes the 954 streetcar going by in front of her, with an automobile blurred in motion just to her left. Parks made the image at 7th Street and Florida Avenue N.W.
Father, son and dogs: In Malheur County, Oregon, on the eastern side of the state bordering Idaho, Dorothea Lange encountered Mr. Dougherty, who leans on a shovel, looking lovingly at his smiling young son, while two dogs rest nearby. The farmer, his wife and five children lived in a basement house - partially underground - and purchased their land with a loan from the Farm Security Administration. The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation built irrigation projects in the county to enable productive farming.
Rocky road: Arthur Rothstein photographed a rugged “road” - in reality a rocky trail - up the mountain to Nicholson Hollow in Shenandoah National Park, Virginia, in October 1935.
Steel mill neighborhood: Houses, leafless trees and electric poles descend a steep street in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, leading to the stacks and buildings of the Bethlehem Steel Co. plant. Smoke and haze shroud the steel mill in the photograph, made by Walker Evans in November 1935.
Migrant girl on truck: A girl “catches the wind” as her parents lift a table onto their truck before they leave Muskogee, Oklahoma, for California. Russell Lee photographed this family’s part in the “Okie” migration in July 1939.
Slingshot boy: A young boy pulls on a homemade slingshot with all his might. Marion Post Wolcott photographed the action in September 1940 in the Kentucky hills near Buckhorn.
A woman still dressed in her work attire leans on her dresser as she listens intently to a murder mystery on her radio. An overflowing waste basket sits on the floor of her boardinghouse room. This is one of the images in Bubley’s photo essay on “Life in a boardinghouse in Washington, D.C.,” which she photographed in her sister’s building in 1943.
Waiting by the alley: John Vachon, in the summer of 1940, captured a man with a straw hat standing along a cobblestone and brick street in Chicago, Illinois. The Father & Son clothing store where he stands borders a long alley with prominent fire escapes.
Ices: A young Black girl waits for a street vendor to make her an ice on a Harlem street in the summer of 1938. The vendor offers a selection of flavorings and three sizes, priced at 2, 3 and 5 cents. The vendor’s cart appears to have been converted from a baby carriage.
Scrap for the war: Marjory Collins photographed a pile of scrap metal collected for recycling for the war effort at a collection site in Washington, D.C., in May 1942. Piled near a heavy-duty chain and other industrial scrap, a bumper and set of auto headlights dominate the foreground.
Arthur Rothstein photographed this failed bank in Haverhill, Iowa, in September 1939. The large window to the left of the entrance door appears to be broken. Posters for the Cole Bros. circus cover the door and the large window to its right. The Social Security Administration website’s history section features Rothstein’s photo, with the following text: “Many smaller banks, such as this one in Haverhill, Iowa, lacked sufficient reserves to stay in business and became no more than convenient billboards. Many of the small banks had lent large portions of their assets for stock market speculation and were virtually put out of business overnight when the market crashed. In all, 9,000 banks failed--taking with them $7 billion in depositors' assets. And in the 1930s there was no such thing as deposit insurance--this was a New Deal reform. When a bank failed the depositors were simply left without a penny. The life savings of millions of Americans were wiped out by the bank failures.”
Delivering water: A horse pulls a home-made skid carrying a water barrel from a distant spring. Theodor Jung photographed the delivery system in Garrett County, Maryland, in September 1935.
Show and tell: A teenage model builder (at right) shows three younger boys the fine points of building model airplanes. A collection of saws and other tools hangs on the wall behind them. Risdon Tillery made the photograph at the Greenwich House community center in New York City in May 1944. Full caption: “New York, New York. A fifteen-year-old expert on model airplanes who formerly spent all day Saturdays at the movies, now devoting his time to the instruction of younger boys enrolled in the day care program at Greenwich House, a community center.”
Feed, food and drink: In an unidentified location in Louisiana, Walker Evans photographed a waterfront warehouse district in March 1936. This image shows three businesses: on the left, a grain and feed store selling Ful-O-Pep feeds; in the center, Harris Distributing Co., purveyor of Best Foods products, Borden’s Cheese and Hellman’s Mayonnaise, with a delivery driver sitting in the open back door of his truck; and on the right, Peters Bottling Co., which, according to another Evans photo, bottled Orange Crush, Golden Spike Pale Dry Ginger Ale and Buffalo Rock Ginger Ale.
The youngest son of the Hale family, living near Black River Falls, Wisconsin, sits on a sawhorse that holds a grinding wheel. A barrel, tires, a headboard and other castoffs sit near the log house. The caption to another of the Hale photos says, “This farm house was built with a total expenditure of three dollars in money.” Russell Lee made the photograph in May 1937.
Bushels of fun: Six children play with a bushel basket on a brick sidewalk in front of a frame house. Carl Mydans made the photograph in the Georgetown section of Washington, D.C., in September 1935.
Grocery stop: A gentleman with work pants, coat, hat and cane sits on a grocery-store bench with his two small dogs. On the storefront sidewalk are bags of potatoes and bushel baskets of produce. Advertised in the window: beef, 9 cents a pound, and oleo, three pounds for 25 cents.
Chicken joint: Photographing the streets of Daytona Beach, Florida, in early 1943, Gordon Parks stopped near Howard’s Chicken Shack. The restaurant offered delivery by auto or bicycle, or patio seating. The delivery driver probably filled up at the Amoco down the street.
Desert cemetery: Rhyolite, Nevada, was a booming mining town in the early 1900s, but was essentially abandoned by 1911. It took on a second life thereafter as a tourist “ghost town,” which it remains today. In 1940, Arthur Rothstein photographed the Rhyolite cemetery, with several fenced-in graves.
Ben Shahn traveled to Arkansas in October 1935 for the Resettlement Administration, the predecessor of the Farm Security Administration. In addition to photographing sharecroppers and Ozark Mountain families, he captured images of cotton pickers on the Alexander plantation in Pulaski County. Captions indicate that the pickers reported to work at 6:30 a.m. and received 60 cents a day.
In August 1939, Dorothea Lange photographed the Arnold farm in Thurston County, Washington. In this image, Lange shows the four Arnold children (one daughter looking out the window at the right). The son proudly holds the handlebar of the bicycle he bought with money he earned. Another daughter in bare feet holds a cat.
Tending a grave: On Memorial Day in 1943, two Black women work on a gravesite at Arlington National Cemetery near Washington, D.C. They kneel on the ground as they plant flowers and straighten the small flag on the grave of their loved one. Rows of simple granite headstones cross the ground in the background. Esther Bubley made the photograph.
Up Two Bit Creek: A prospector, his face hidden by his cap as he bends over his work, uses a sluice box to search for gold in Two Bit Creek, near Deadwood in the Black Hills of South Dakota. Russell Lee photographed the miner in January 1938.
Road building with mules: A work crew uses mule power to build a road on the side of a hill at Shelby Forest, near Memphis, Tennessee. Carl Mydans captured the work in March 1936.
Men of steel: Two workers in a Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, steel mill use sledgehammers to “tap” a blast furnace to release the slag and molten iron. The steelworkers are not wearing gloves or other safety gear. Arthur Rothstein made the photograph in July 1938.
Beachfront: In February 1939, Russell Lee photographed a shanty town housing migrants and squatters along Nueces Bay near Corpus Christi, Texas. The shack of a World War I veteran has a tarpaulin roof and is sided in old 7 Up signs. A woman stands in the open doorway with a blonde toddler at her feet. In the background are other shanties and the bay.
Alley ball: Two boys throw a ball in a wide brick alley in Dubuque, Iowa, in April 1940. John Vachon captured the scene, showing the alleyway lined on both sides by old buildings, garage doors, trash and parked cars and trucks. A line of electric poles borders the left side of the alley into the distance, while a small dog stands near the boys.
Children in Osage, a West Virginia coal-mining town, walk home from school in this photograph by Marion Post Wolcott. They walk on a road and on railroad tracks that run through the town. Wolcott made the photograph in September 1938, on her first assignment for the Farm Security Administration. She was the first full-time woman photographer at the New Deal agency.
Budget cuts: A Black man, likely the barber, sits in front of the “S. H. Money Saving Barber Shop” in Natchez, Mississippi. Ben Shahn made the photograph of the rough wood storefront in October 1935. Visible through the screen door at the left is part of a barber chair.
Sandwich shop: With his penchant for photographing roadside architecture, Walker Evans found “George’s Place” in Ponchatoula, Louisiana, in February 1936. The sandwich shop doubled as an emporium for bananas, oysters, bushel baskets of fruit, Coca-Cola and Blue Bird ice cream. Would that be George, the proprietor, in the center with the apron and bow tie?
Striking copper: Three striking union men are shown sitting by a sidewalk in Ducktown, Tennessee, in 1939. Union workers went on strike against the Tennessee Copper Co. after negotiations broke down in July 1939. The union members were represented by the International Association of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers.
Shopping used: Four men examine the tread on used tires at a business in Corpus Christi, Texas, in February 1939. Russell Lee photographed the scene. Also on offer: hubcaps and wheels - and welding.
Barbara Wright, an occasional photographer for the Farm Security Administration, photographed a woman as if she were wearing a suit made of chili peppers somewhere in New Mexico in 1941. The woman holds the long, oval-shaped string of peppers in front of her as she stands next to a barbed wire fence strung on makeshift posts.
Reading time on the porch: A woman catches up on her reading — looking though “Time” magazine - on a porch in Lincoln, Vermont, in July 1940. Louise Rosskam made the photograph, which shows a cat, a kite, a broom, potted plants, fishing rods, a galvanized tub and a variety of long-handled tools. Note, too, the ample supply of reading material on the stand beneath the kite.
Locomotive repairs: Two Chicago & Northwestern Railroad maintenance men work on a steam locomotive in the repair shops. The worker at the left, outside the locomotive, examines the headlight, while the second works inside the smokebox at the front of the engine. Jack Delano made the image in December 1942, during a period when he frequently photographed railroad operations to highight the industry’s role in the war effort.
NYPD: A Black New York City policeman watches over a street on his beat in Harlem. "Additional information on caption card: William Alexander Frazier, b. 1916 in Harlem.” Gordon Parks made the street portrait in May 1943.
The Eight Ball: Construction workers building the Shasta Dam north of Redding, California, frequented The Eight Ball pool hall (and card club, according to the legend displayed in the window). The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation built the dam between 1938 and 1945 on the Sacramento River. In late 1940, Russell Lee photographed the Shasta County boom towns that developed because of the dam project.
Soap to flour: Walker Evans captured the “general” in general store in this July 1936 photograph. A close look at the image reveals such items as canned goods, bags of flour, boxes of soap, dishes, lanterns, rope, dustpans, brooms, coffee pots, hand towels, buckets, chairs and Mason jars. A large floor safe sits behind the bags of self-rising Snow Ball flour. One calendar says July 1936; the other appears to show January.
Music makers: Two Black musicians give an impromptu performance for the photographer, Russell Lee, outside a store in Louisiana in November 1938. Both are wearing shirts with loosened ties. The musician on the left plays an accordion, while his partner plays a washboard. On the left side of the frame, a barefoot boy sits next to them, watching Lee with wide eyes. Behind the musicians, people inside the building take in the scene outside through a window.
Frozen Creek mail call: A horse tied to a picket fence stands near his owner as the man, on the opposite side of the fence, reads a letter in front of his house. The man, with wire-rim glasses and a straw hat, lives on Frozen Creek near the town of Jackson, in the Kentucky mountains.
Piled-up scrap metal from the dismantling of a large barn that happened in May 2018.
Outside Zinc: Photographing Arkansas small towns and poor families in the Ozark Mountains in October 1935, Ben Shahn came upon Zinc, a one-time mining town with only a few remaining residents. Outside Zinc, Shahn made an image of an abandoned truck in pieces along a dirt road near railroad tracks. A sign warns: “Hazardous STOP Arkansas LAW.”
There is much to parse in this 1939 Dorothea Lange photograph of a North Carolina country store. Lange’s full caption reads: “Country store on dirt road. Sunday afternoon. Note the kerosene pump on the right and the gasoline pump on the left. Rough, unfinished timber posts have been used as supports for porch roof. Negro men are sitting on the porch. Brother of store owner stands in doorway. Gordonton, North Carolina.” In addition to displaying a multitude of signs, the building rests on a rather makeshift foundation. (The Museum of Modern Art holds a sepia variation of this image in which the Black men on the porch are looking at the camera.)
All dressed up with nowhere to go: Sitting on a bench in front of The Playhouse pool hall in Jackson, Ohio, two young men talk things over. Dressed in dark suits with open-collar dress shirts - the man on the right sporting a stylish pair of sunglasses - they are observed through the window by another man inside the pool hall. Theodor Jung made the photograph in April 1936.