Previous Artifacts - July 2007

 

 

East Sioux Falls Photo Album

An old photograph album was recently donated to the Museums, and it is full of images of a place that has almost vanished from the local landscape.  Tim and Barbara Norman donated the album after purchasing it on the on-line auction site E-bay - and we are very grateful to them!  The majority of the images document the area in and around East Sioux Falls, a once vibrant quarrying community that eventually was abandoned after the market for quartzite collapsed.

 

The majority of the photographs are sepia-tone snapshots of a variety of subjects, including the interiors and exteriors of farmhouses, people on picnics, threshing crews, the East Sioux Falls marching band and various buildings in the town including the railroad depot, the grain elevator and the lumber yard.  None of these buildings are standing today. 

 

Several pictures of farm animals - horses, hogs, puppies and ducks - are also adhered to the grey pages of the album.  Each photograph is labeled on a small piece of white paper with the subject matter and a date, so we know that the majority of them were taken between May and November of 1901.  Other notations on these white tags may be the camera settings for the exposure time and aperture used by the photographer.  Photography became a popular hobby after the invention of the small, relatively inexpensive portable camera, known as a "brownie" because its mechanism was enclosed in plain brown box.  The development of these cameras was largely responsible for the beginnings of "candid" photography - images that captured an unrehearsed, un-posed moment, often outside of a studio - the type of images in this wonderful album.