A couple of months ago, I received an email from the Hershey History Center about three photographs they had found in their collection. The photos show a graduating class of a women’s school. We know from the small inscription in the lower left corner that this is the class of 1924. What we don’t know… Read More »A photographic mystery
Recently we accessioned an interesting album of photographs of a company called Norristown Concrete. The photographs were taken by Henry K. Bussa, a local photographer who was active for over 50 years.
In the very early days of this blog, I wrote about Treemount Seminary. The school was a private boarding and day school founded in Norristown in 1857. The school existed for 43 years and educated about 5,000 students. For decades after the school closed, an active alumni association continued to keep its memory alive through… Read More »Treemount and tintypes
This week, I processed a collection of papers donated by Jean Brown Hall in 1984. The collection has receipts, genealogical research, and many photographs. There’s something arresting about old portraits – the clothing, the hairstyles, the faces themselves are fascinating. I thought this week, it would be nice to look at some of the pictures… Read More »Children’s portraits
About a month ago, we received four class pictures in the mail. An accompanying letter explained that the donor had purchased the photos together at a flea market in Michigan.
Tonight the Historical Society is hosting a preview of our new exhibit, Pairings: Photographs from the Collections of the Historical Society of Montgomery County. The exhibit will open to the public on Saturday, April 23, and it will continue on display until August. The exhibit highlights our photograph collection, showing its diversity. Our collection contains… Read More »Exhibit preview
Currently, the Historical Society of Montgomery County is working on a project to scan the thousands of historic photographs in our collection. While scanning this afternoon, I came across a couple of nice photographs of nineteenth-century Norristown, and I thought it would be interesting to see how these spots look today. This image is identified… Read More »Norristown – Then and Now
Frederick Naile’s bakery stood on Main St. in between DeKalb Street and Swede Street in Norristown. This picture was probably taken around 1850. If you look closely, you’ll notice that the name of the shop is written twice. First it says, “Frederick Naile Baker” in our familiar Latin text; underneath, it says “Friedrich Nagel Becker”… Read More »Picture of the week
In the 1830s, Sir Charles Wheatstone developed stereoscopy, which is a technique that uses two slightly different images, one seen by the right eye, and the other by the left, to create a three-dimensional experience for a viewer. His stereoscope used mirrors and drawings, but it was large and bulky. Over the next half-century, many… Read More »Cat photos: not just an internet sensation