Kingston (Massachusetts) Public Library
Missing the warm weather yet? Now that we’re halfway through winter, spring is right around the corner.
Take a look at this beautiful bed of asters in front of the house at 280 Main Street, built around 1897. The woman on the left is Martha Maglathlin. On the right you can see the fork of Wapping Road (left) and Pembroke Street (right), with the public watering trough at the point of the intersection.
Source: Image from the Local History Room Image Collection (IC7).
Kneeling, left to right: Bob Bailey, Raoul Corazzari, George Candini, Clyde Melli, Eddie Cadwell, Stephen Reed, Bob Davis
In 1933, the Kingston High School football team won the South Shore Championship. Over the course of this season, they won five games, lost two, and tied one. 13 out of the 28 team members can be seen here in their practice jerseys on the field behind the Reed Community House. They were coached by Mr. Gotschall, the Principal, who also supervised the basketball team.
Source: Image from the Local History Room Image Collection (IC7).
When the US entered World War I in 1917 and called for a draft, Joseph Finney registered during the first round. He became one of approximately 2 million men who joined the American Expeditionary Forces, armed forces sent overseas to Europe. Throughout his service he exchanged postcards with friends and family, especially his elder sister, Ella Finney, and the woman he went on to marry upon his return, Mary Fries. Looking through this correspondence allows us to piece together a loose timeline of his experiences. Stop by the library to check out this exhibit for yourself!
Source: Image from the Joseph Cushman Finney Papers (MC11).
Since we saw a photo of Rose Delano with a litter of puppies earlier this month, it’s only fair to see a feline friend too! Here is Norma Drew holding a rather patient cat in her arms.
Source: Image from the Emily Fuller Drew Collection (MC16).
On a snowy, winter day a hundred years ago, these four young men strapped on their cross-country skis and posed for this picture right in the center of Summer Street, just north of the railroad tracks. The Adams Block is visible on the right, and the laundry building that was previously the freight station for the railroad is visible on the left.
Source: Image from the Albion Holmes Collection (MC25).
Cyanotype photographic prints are immediately recognizable. Their striking blue appearance is the result of a particular chemical combination (though the prints can in fact be toned to alter this color).
Credited to Sir John Herschel—an astronomer and chemist—in 1842, the cyanotype process involves coating a piece of paper with a solution of ferric ammonium citrate before exposing it to light under a positive image (as opposed to a negative image, which is the inversion). Then, that exposed paper is developed with a potassium ferricyanide solution.
Anna Atkins, who knew Herschel as a friend of her father, used this process to illustrate her botanical studies. Her three-volume work, Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions (1843–53), was the first photographically illustrated book.
The first commercial cyanotype paper emerged in 1872 in France. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) started instructing its students on the cyanotype process for the creation of blueprints in 1875. The following year, the first commercial blueprint machine made in Switzerland was introduced at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition, the first official World’s Fair in the United States.
From the 1870s to the 1950s, the cyanotype process was primarily used by engineers and architects for printing blueprints. It was revived by photographers during the 1960s as an alternative to the silver gelatin process.
We have a number of cyanotypes here in the Local History Room.
If you’d like to see these—or the other cyanotypes we have—in person, stop by the Local History Room!
Sources: Images from the Delano Photograph Collection (IC11) and the Emily Fuller Drew Collection (MC16).
Stulik, Dusan, and Art Kaplan. 2013. The Atlas of Analytical Signatures of Photographic Processes. Los Angeles, CA: Getty Conservation Institute. http://hdl.handle.net/10020/gci_pubs/atlas_analytical
James, Christopher. 2014. “The Cyanotype Process” in The Book of Alternative Photographic Processes. (Course Technology). https://www.christopherjames-studio.com/docs/chapter7-the-cyanotype-process.pdf
Here’s an especially fun photograph to enjoy. It’s clear from the blurriness that the puppies were on the move—as puppies usually are. Rose (Blair) Delano is holding one of them, while a stoic hound sits by her side.
Source: Image from the Delano Photograph Collection (IC11).
Ada Brewster, born in Kingston on May 25, 1842, lived a fascinating life. She served as a nurse at Lovell General Hopsital in Rhode Island during the Civil War; worked at the U.S. Mint in Carson City, Nevada during the production of the first trade dollar coined by the federal government; studied art at the Lowell Institute in Boston and the California School of Design (now the San Francisco Art Institute); opened her own art studio and became known as a portraitist, illustrator, china-painter, and teacher; and moved all over the country before returning home to Kingston in 1919. Stop by to learn more in this month’s Local History exhibit, featuring a selection of Ada’s sketches from her time out West.
Source: This sketch comes from the Ada Brewster Collection (MC24).
Happy New Year from the Local History Room!
Source: Postcard from the Joseph Cushman Finney Papers (MC11).
One of this season’s new movies, The Post, recounts The Washington Post’s efforts to publish the Pentagon Papers.
Here in the Local History Room, we have a four-volume set of the Pentagon Papers, published by Beacon Press in 1971. As director of the publisher, Kingston’s own Gobin Stair played a decisive role in accepting Senator Mike Gravel’s proposal to publish the papers for the first time in book form and subsequently ensuring that Beacon could shoulder the political pressure, financial burden, and logistical obstacles they encountered throughout the publication process.
The first volume in our set is signed by Daniel Ellsberg, the military analyst who released the papers to the newspapers. If you’d like to see it for yourself, just let us know!
Gobin Stair was also a distinguished artist. He created the Alphabet Mural—depicting the evolution of language, literacy, and communication—that we are lucky to have on the wall of our meeting room. A supporter of libraries, he wrote at the time of the mural’s opening, “The Alphabet Mural calls attention to a major human accomplishment. It also declares our awareness of responsibility to meet the needs of readers right here in our growing Kingston.” Well said.
If you’re interested in some further reading, the Beacon Broadside just posted a great piece called “Our Civic Duty: Why We Published the Pentagon Papers.”