Historic Hood River
Summer Vacation
8-6-2026
Notes
Sometime around 1900 a Hood River resident visited Europe, and we have a handful of their film negatives from the trip. Several were identifiable as scenes from France, including Versailles and the Paris Exposition of 1900, but this one has me stumped. It seems like the cliffs and the rock work should give this away. Any guesses? Any confident IDs? It’s possible the negative has been flipped. Also, those black dots are holes in the emulsion, not part of the scene.
Rico
I used AI to search the picture and this is what it came up with “This historic photograph shows St Margaret’s Bay near Dover, Kent, England”
Arthur Babitz
I’m a little skeptical since I can’t find historic images of that site with these buildings, but most of the pictures are from later decades. I’ll send this to the village historical society and see what they say.
Arthur Babitz
I received a very nice reply from the St Margaret’s History Society confirming my suspicions: while this has some similarities to St. Margaret, the cliffs are not quite the same and they have no buildings like this.
My guess is we’re looking at the French side of the Channel.
I’m not sure why AI is so confident in its errors with photo attributions. When I look at the available historic images which the AI agent is using to make the attribution, it’s not hard to find problems. Instead of using the AI conclusions I like to look at the images the search engine thinks are similar and try to make my own matches.