Historic Hood River

Notes

Here’s a little behind the scenes at the photo archives:  This image of a women’s drill team during the Spanish American War gives an idea of the issues we have with photo preservation and interpretation.  The original print is mounted on cardboard.  The cardboard has been roughly trimmed (probably to fit a file cabinet), cutting off some of the fountain pen ink caption at the bottom.  That message refers to the Butler Bank Building, so it must have been added after 1924, though while fountain pens were still in use.

The image is faded, but it’s a large (about 8×10″) professional print with plenty of detail.  The fading can be mostly reversed with Photoshop, though that process will enhance some of the dirt and smudges on the surface.  You can see a similar print from a couple of minutes earlier or later which has been enhanced here.

Earl Bartmess and Eph Winans have been identified on the photo.  I’m cautious about non-contemporaneous IDs (both the people and the event) but in this case the reverse includes a newspaper article which verifies much of the info on the front.  Note the faded “Bradley” stamp on the back– he was possibly the photographer, and this associates the print with the The Hood River Sun and/or the Hood River News.  The News wasn’t publishing in 1899, but Bradley was associated with both.  Local photographs were very rare in the 1899 newspapers, so it’s more likely the image and the caption were published after 1924 in some sort of “yesteryears” column.

The handwritten pencil notes on the reverse are, I believe, Sally Donovan’s handwriting, so they were probably added in the 1990s or so.  The numbers indicate it has been in the museum collection for a long time.   57.017 means it was added to a database in 1957, though that date could have been when they finally got around to cataloging decades worth of collecting.  We see many 1955 and 1957 accession numbers, and none earlier.  ID 2137 refers to some early cataloging of images.  Unfortunately we don’t have any record of this catalog beyond the random notes on images.

There’s a third image from this series here.

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