Dated Images

Crown Bank Port Dover Ontario 1906

Today’s dated image is a 1906 postcard, which serves to illustrate several interesting points about dating, copyright, photographs and postcards. The image side shows three gentlemen standing around the door of small building with a large sign on it — The Crown Bank of Canada. The picture is natural in tone and appearance for a black and white photograph — but it is not a photograph, it is a mechanical print.

If this picture were of much higher resolution, or if you had the original and looked at with a magnifying glass, you could probably see small dots make up the image (i.e. it is half-toned). There are other mechanical print methods used on postcards that do not have that feature though, such as woodburytypes. Perhaps we will find one of those for a future example. Mechanical prints are often made from real photographs, so they are reproductions of photographs, but they are not printed by photographic means, so they are not photographs.

Other postcards are real photographs — like our 1914 photo of the Thays family. Dealers and collectors refer to those as RPPCs – Real Photo Post Cards. Many eBay sellers don’t know the difference between the two, but use the term anyhow.

Our print has Pt Dover (for Port Dover) written on the face. There are two postmarks, one over the Canadian stamp with the beginning of a town name ‘Sim’ visible, and ‘No’ from the month, and at bottom another, clearer mark showing Grand Rapids, Mich, and Nov 1906. The card is addressed to Mr C M Hembling of Grand Rapids. It didn’t take much detective work to find Port Dover Ontario on Lake Erie, just a few miles from the larger town of Simcoe Ontario. We often see stamp boxes from those years with instructions to place a one-cent stamp for the US and Canada and two cents for Foreign. This shows that worked from either side of the border.

Since it predates the 1907 introduction of the divided-back, there is no message — just the recipients address. Many cards from that period included some blank area on the front for a short message, but in this case the image takes up the whole card.

We call this a 1906 photo, based on the postmark, but of course it could have been photographed any time prior to that. Since it was mailed in November, it may actually come from a photograph taken late-Spring or early-Summer (there are leaves on the trees) in 1906 and printed later that summer. Or it could be from a year or two earlier. The styles of the gent’s clothing suggest it was not much earlier. The building looks new, so local research might further limit the possible date range.

Because this is a mechanical print, we know it was ‘published’ and hence is in the public domain. It was probably printed as a free give-away by the bank. The situation is not always so clear with real-photo postcards. Many real-photo cards were produced in small quantities, not for sale, but for the use of some individual or family. If they were not made available to the public, they are unpublished, and their copyright extends for much longer. All images published prior to 1923 are in the public domain. In fact most postcards published 1923 to 1962 are also public domain because their original copyright was not renewed. But unpublished images are protected by copyright until 70 years after the photographer’s death, or for 120 years if the photographer was anonymous. See my discussion on the ClassyArts site for more info on copyrights.

Napoleon 'Larry' Lajoie in wheelchair 1905

This photograph is of baseball player Napoleon “Larry” Lajoie, an American of French-Canadian descent, and one of the games all-time great hitters. After winning three consecutive batting titles in 1902, 1903 and 1904, Larry (also called Nap) Lajoie was side-lined when an untreated spike injury became infected. After recovering he found a new challenger for the batting crown — Ty Cobb — and the two had an ongoing rivalry for the next ten years. This photo was taken in July of 1905 as he recovered from that leg infection.

The photographer was Louis Van Oeyen, who was a staff photographer for the Newspaper Enterprise Association at the time. Van Oeyen also worked for the Cleveland Press, and is considered a pioneer of sports photography. His collection of nearly 3,000 negatives and and equal number of historic photographs has been preserved, and can be found at the Western Reserve Historical Society. Most of the images are from the 1920s and 1930s, but the collections spans from 1890 to 1945. Van Oeyen was official photographer for the American League from 1908 to 1922. Louis Van Oeyen was born 17 January 1865 in Dayton Ohio, and died 12 December 1946 in Cleveland.

Finely dressed lady carrying a walking stick in ersatz mountain scene.

Here is a good example of mid-1870s style, with the floor-sweeping dress trailing off behind this erstwhile mountain climber. She is of course not really in the mountains, but in the photographic studio of J Ganz in Zurich, standing next to a huge paper-maché boulder.

This image also demonstrates the universality of women’s fashion in the 19th century — this lady would not look out-of-place in London or Boston in that year. They were all wearing whatever was in vogue in Paris, with only minor local variations.

Daguerreotype of an Older Woman from 1855

This image shows an older woman wearing a light colored bonnet with lacy ties hanging down loose. The hair is center parted, of course, with side bulges typical of the early 1850s. Her dress is dark with epaulets on the sleeves and she wears a shiny silk shawl thrown around her shoulders. We can see many pleats where the skirt meets the bodice, but many other details are obscured by the shawl.

The dress has a broad white lace collar, and she is also wearing a thin neck ribbon. There is a dark broach at her throat, probably of inlaid jet. Very light tinting has been added to give her face a more natural color. No doubt she thought the daguerreotype drew her many wrinkles in a bit too sharp of detail.

The daguerreotype is cased, and has a fairly plain mat, with just a light embossed line around the opening, which is rectangular with rounded corners. The preserver is a lighter colored brass, and of a simple repetitive leaf and flower pattern.

4th July 1911 Marching Band in Keene NH

Proudly marching down the main street of Keene, New Hampshire, this band was probably one of several participating in the annual Independence Day parade in 1911. The gentlemen wear a fairly simple uniform with dark pants and a straight-cut coat with simple trim along the edges, and conductor-style billed caps.

Behind them on the left we can just see the over-decorated wide brimmed hat of a well dressed lady from that period, while to the right are several boys wearing knickerbockers — a baggy version of knee-breeches gathered just below the knee where they meet the long dark stockings. Some are wearing suit coats over those, and even those that aren’t seem to have long sleeves, even though it is July.

A couple men to the right have the flat-topped straw hats called boaters, with their broad contrasting dark grosgrain or silk hat bands.

Besides the ubiquitous American flags, several people have large dark umbrellas for shade from the bright sun, which is above, behind and to the left of the photographer.