1910s

Baldasaro’s Fruit Market, Bellows Falls, Vermont

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The building at the northern end of the Square, between Rockingham and Canal Streets in Bellows Falls, around 1904-1914. Image courtesy of the Rockingham Free Public Library.

The scene in 2018:

During the early 20th century, downtown Bellows Falls suffered a series of devastating fires that destroyed many of the 19th century buildings here at the Square. Throughout this time, though, this modest wood-frame commercial block has survived largely unscathed, with few significant changes since the first photo was taken more than a century ago.

The building’s origins date back to around 1820, although it was heavily reconstructed around 1890, including the addition of a third floor. By about the turn of the 20th century, the storefront was occupied by Baldasaro’s Fruit Market, as shown in the first photo. The market was run by Pasquale “Patsy” Baldasaro, an Italian immigrant who came to the United States as a teenager in the mid-1880s. He spent some time working as a foreman for the Boston & Maine Railroad, but he subsequently came to to Bellows Falls, where he opened a fruit market on Canal Street before moving his store to this location.

Baldasaro ran the business until the early 1910s, when he sold it to two of his clerks, and he died in 1921 at the age of 48. However, he was still remembered many years later, and his store was mentioned in the 1958 book History of the Town of Rockingham Vermont, which provides the following reminiscence:

At the north end of the Square, now occupied by the Army & Navy Store which opened there in 1946, was once the fruit store where Patsy Baldasaro hung out great bunches of bananas, set out baskets of oranges and apples, watermelons and coconuts and whose peanut roasting maching [sic] whistled cheerfully on the edge of the sidewalk. Patsy was a well known figure in town for many years and every housewife rallied to his long-drawn call of “ba-na-nas, o-ran-ges,” as he rode his cart through the streets, seated like a Gargantua, his immense body making it a hazardous adventure to get up and down from his high perch. Youngsters saved their pennies to buy an orange as big as a croquet ball for a nickle and the last thing on Saturday afternoons, thrifty mothers could buy eighteen dead ripe bananas for a quarter. The pleasant ghost of Patsy still rides the summer streets along with the sprinkling cart, the ice wagon and the hot smell of tar sidewalks on a July day. His broad face always smiled but his whip was ready to reach out and flick the bare legs of any youngster who sneaked up behind to snitch a loose banana or coconut.

As mentioned in that excerpt, the building was used as an army and navy store during the mid 20th century, and since then it has seen a variety of other commercial tenants, including, in recent years, a cycling studio and an antique shop. Then, in 2017 it was purchased by Rockingham Roasters, and over the past few years the building has undergone a major restoration, including repairing the foundation and gutting the interior. The first photo was taken during the summer of 2018 in the midst of this work, and the project is still ongoing, although the coffee shop is projected to open at some point this year.

Overall, the historic building has remained well-preserved on the exterior, and the only significant difference since the early 20th century is the altered storefront on the ground floor. Several of the surrounding buildings are also still standing from the first photo, including the old fire station on the far left, which was built in 1904. Today, these buildings, along with the rest of the historic properties in the area, are now part of the Bellows Falls Downtown Historic District, which was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1982.

Fort Bridgman Road, Vernon, Vermont

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The view looking north on Fort Bridgman Road, toward the intersection of Pond Road in Vernon, probably sometime around 1907-1918. Image from author’s collection.

The scene in 2018:

The town of Vernon is located in the extreme southeast corner of Vermont, and for much of its history it was small, with a population that consistently hovered around 600 to 800 people throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries. Most of this population was dispersed across 20 square miles, so Vernon never had a densely-settled town center, but the main village in town was here along Fort Bridgman Road, near the corner of Pond Road.

During the 19th century, this area was the commercial hub of the town, with an 1869 map showing a sawmill, blacksmith’s shop, carpenter’s shop, lumber yard, a church, and a building that was occupied by a store, post office, and hotel. There were also about a dozen houses clustered in the immediate vicinity, and the railroad passed through here along the Connecticut River, although the depot itself was located a little further to the north of here.

The first photo was taken at some point in the early 20th century, evidently soon after a snowstorm. It is a real photo postcard, meaning that it is a photograph that was developed directly onto postcard stock, instead of being mass-produced via printing. The photo is undated, but the markings on the reverse suggest that it was taken at some point between 1907 and 1918. On the reverse is a message written by a woman named Ethel Davis, who apparently also took the photo. It reads:

Dear Aunt Jessie,

I thought you probably would like to hear from me as I am up in Vt. with a friend. This is not a very good picture as we take them our selves. It is quite lonsome up here. This is Main St Vernon, Vt.

There is lots of snow up here. I am not very lonsome. But do wish I were home. From your niece Ethel Davis.

The photo shows the view looking north toward the town center, with the Connecticut River just out of view on the far right, and the railroad on an embankment to the left. The most visible building in this scene is the Vernon Union Church, on the right side of the road. It was completed in 1900, and it replaced an earlier one on the same site, which had burned after being struck by lightning a year earlier. Beyond the church is a building that appears to have been the store/post office/hotel from the 1869 map, and on the left side of the road is a house that probably dates to the first half of the 19th century. It appears on the 1869 map as well, when it was listed as the home of Mrs. R. S. Bryant.

In more than a century since the first photo was taken, Vernon has undergone some major changes, the most significant of which was the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant, which operated in the town from 1972 until 2014. Thanks in part to the resulting jobs and low taxes, Vernon saw rapid population growth in the late 20th century. By the 2010 census, the town had more than 2,200 residents, which was nearly four times its population when the first photo was taken.

However, despite this growth, the town center here along Fort Bridgman Road has remained small. Many of the old buildings are gone, including the mixed-use building beyond the church, which is now the site of the town garage. The church is still here, though, as is the house on the other side of the road. Both are hidden by trees in the present-day view, but they have seen few exterior changes since the first photo was taken, and the church remains in use as an active congregation.

Lexington Common, Lexington, Mass

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Looking north on the Lexington Common from near the corner of Bedford Street and Harrington Road, around 1900. Image courtesy of the Library of Congress, Detroit Publishing Company Collection.

The scene around 1910-1915. Image courtesy of the Library of Congress, Detroit Publishing Company Collection.

The scene in 2018:

These photos show a portion of the Lexington Common, which is also known as the Lexington Battle Green. Nearly every New England town has some sort of a common in the center of town, yet this one in Lexington is one of the most famous. It was here, just after dawn on April 19, 1775, that the first shots of the American Revolution were fired, and where eight Lexington militiamen were killed after a brief skirmish with British redcoats who were bound for Concord.

The British soldiers had departed Boston late in the previous evening, with the goal of seizing colonial military supplies that were being stored in Concord. This prompted Paul Revere and other messengers to make their famous midnight ride, alerting the militia companies in the outlying towns. Here in Lexington, a force of about 80 militiamen assembled on the Common. They were led by Captain John Parker, who is said to have instructed his men to “Stand your ground. Don’t fire unless fired upon, but if they mean to have a war, let it begin here.”

Upon arrival, the British ordered the militiamen to leave, with Major John Pitcairn supposedly shouting “Disperse, ye villains! Ye rebels, disperse!” Along with Parker’s earlier command, this would become one of the most famous quotes of the war, although it is hard to say exactly how accurate either of these lines really are. This uncertainty may be due, in part, to the fact that both men died within less than five months after the battle, leaving future historians with little opportunity to verify their battlefield statements.

In any case, Captain Parker recognized that his men were vastly outnumbered, and he ordered them to disperse. However, few evidently heard him. Then, in the midst of this standoff, a shot was fired. The identity of the shooter remains unknown, with both sides generally placing blame on the other, but both the redcoats and the militiamen then began exchanging fire.

The British proved to be far more effective in their fire. By the time the brief battle was over and the redcoats had resumed their march to Concord, they left behind eight dead militiamen and ten wounded, compared to just one wounded British soldier. Among the dead was Jonathan Harrington, who lived in the house that is visible in the distant center of all three photos. According to tradition, he was mortally wounded after the battle, but he managed to crawl back to his doorstep, where he died in his wife’s arms.

Despite how short and one-sided the battle was, it marked the first armed resistance to British aggression, and the Lexington Common has become an important symbol of American independence. The common is now marked by several monuments, including the one here in the foreground of this scene. Dedicated in 1884, this boulder marks the line where the militiamen stood, and it is inscribed with Captain Parker’s famous—if possibly apocryphal—command to his men to stand their ground.

The first photo was taken around the turn of the 20th century, and it shows the Harrington house as it appeared prior to a major renovation in 1910. This project, which was completed by the time the second photo was taken, involved the removal of a wing on the right side of the house, along with the replacement of the large central chimney with two smaller ones. It was intended as a restoration, although the work appears to have been based more on early 20th century ideas about how a colonial house should look, rather than how the Harrington house actually looked during the colonial era.

Today, more than a century after the second photo was taken, very little has changed in this scene. The boulder is still here marking the line of militiamen during the battle, and the Harrington house remains standing in the distance, with few major exterior changes since the 1910 alterations. The other house in this scene, visible further in the distance, also survives today, although it is somewhat younger than the Harrington house, dating back to 1820. The Common itself has also been preserved, serving as both a public park and a historic site, and in 1961 it was designated as a National Historic Landmark.

Ephraim Wales Bull House, Concord, Mass

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The house at 491 Lexington Road in Concord, around 1910-1920. Image courtesy of the Library of Congress, Detroit Publishing Company Collection.

The house in 2018:

This house is famous for being the place where the Concord grape was developed in 1849, although the house itself is actually much older than that. It was built sometime in the late 17th or early 18th centuries, making it among the oldest surviving buildings in Concord. The main section of the house, in the center-left of this scene, is the oldest portion, and it was standing here by 1716, when it was the home of blacksmith Thomas Ball. For more than a century afterward, the house was occupied by a succession of blacksmiths, the last of whom was Nathaniel French, who rented the property until his death in 1834.

Two years later, another metalworker moved into this house. Ephraim Wales Bull was a goldbeater, which involved hammering gold into thin sheets of gold leaf. He was originally from Boston, but by the 1830s he had begun to experience lung problems, so his doctor recommended that he leave the polluted city and move to the countryside. Here in Concord, he continued to work as a goldbeater in a shop behind his house, but he was also an amateur horticulturalist, so he spent a significant amount of time growing plants in his garden.

One of Bull’s goals was to create a grape cultivar that would ripen early and could withstand the cold New England climate. In 1843, he found a wild grapevine—the fox grape—growing on his property, and he planted the seeds from this vine in his garden, alongside cultivated Catawba vines. The resulting hybrid seedlings grew for the next six years, and in the fall of 1849 one of the vines produced satisfactory grapes. He named this cultivar Concord, and in 1853 he exhibited it at the Massachusetts Horticultural Society, where it received high praise. Concord grapes became commercially available the next year, and they have remained popular ever since.

Bull subsequently had success in state and local politics, serving in both houses of the state legislature, on the state board of agriculture, and on Concord’s board of selectmen and school committee. However, despite the widespread recognition that he received for having developed the Concord grape, he received little financial benefit from it. He earned about $3,200 from selling seedlings during the first year, but commercial nurseries subsequently began growing and selling their own plants, without paying any royalties to Bull. By the end of his long life, he was in extreme poverty and his house had become badly deteriorated, and he died in 1895 at the age of 89.

After Bull’s death, his neighbor Harriett Lothrop purchased the house. She lived a few houses down at Nathaniel Hawthorne’s former home, The Wayside, and she was a noted children’s book author, best known for her Five Little Peppers series, which were written under the pen name of Margaret Sidney. Aside from her writing, she was also interested in historic preservation, so she soon began restoring the old house. By the time the first photo was taken around the 1910s, Lothrop had named the house “Grapevine Cottage,” and she owned it as a rental property. The original Concord grapevine was still growing here at the time, although it is not visible in this photo.

Today, more than a century after the first photo was taken, the house is still standing. It has seen some changes, most notably the addition of an enclosed second-story porch on the right side, but otherwise it looks much the same as it did in the first photo. It has recently undergone another restoration, including remodeling the interior, and it stands as a rare surviving example of an early colonial-era house in Concord, in addition to its historical significance as the birthplace of the Concord grape.

Main Street, Concord, Mass

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The view looking west on Main Street, from the corner of Lexington Road in Concord, around 1910-1920. Image courtesy of the Library of Congress, Detroit Publishing Company Collection.

The scene in 2018:

These two photos were taken more than a century apart, from the small rotary at the intersection of Monument Road, Lexington Road, and Main Street in downtown Concord. The view is facing west down Main Street, showing a variety of low-rise commercial buildings, most of which date back to the 19th century. Aside from some obvious modern changes, such as an increase in automobiles on the road and a lack of trolleys in the present-day photo, remarkably little has changed in this scene, and most of the historic buildings here on Main Street remain well-preserved.

This block of Main Street was originally known as the Milldam. Starting in the 17th century, the site of the street was a dam across the Mill Brook, and over the years it steadily grew to include a variety of offices and stores on top of the dam itself. Then, in 1828 the Milldam Company was formed, and it purchased the land on either side of the dam. The pond was subsequently drained, the old buildings on the dam were demolished, and new lots were laid out. The result was new commercial buildings on either side of Main Street, and many of these are still standing today.

Starting on the far left side, the closest building to the foreground of the two photos is Garty’s Block, which came several decades after the milldam was reconstructed. It dates back to around 1870, and it originally had a Second Empire-style mansard roof, as shown in the first photo. This has since been removed, and the ground floor storefront has also been altered at some point in the 20th century, leaving only the second floor relatively unaltered from the exterior. Just to the right of it, at 15-17 Main Street, is a two-story building that once housed Alexander Urquhart’s bakery. It was constructed in 1898, replacing an earlier wooden structure on the same site, and it still stands today, with fewer dramatic changes than its neighbor to the left.

Further in the distance is a pair of two-story buildings with gabled roofs and high chimneys on their end walls. These features distinguish them from later 19th century commercial blocks, which tended to have flat roofs and less prominent chimneys. Both buildings were part of the Milldam Company’s redevelopment of the area, and they were constructed sometime around 1835. Like most of the other buildings here, the ground floors have been altered, but otherwise they have retained much of their original appearance.

Just beyond these two buildings, in the first photo, is a small two-story Italianate-style building that probably dated back to around the 1850s or 1860s. This is one of the few buildings from the first photo that is no longer standing; it was demolished by the early 1930s, when the present-day building—originally a First National Store—was constructed on the site. On the other side of it is the Davis-Richardson Block at 37 Main Street, which features a design similar to the nearby 1835 buildings. This block is slightly newer, though, having been built around 1845.

Some of the other 19th century buildings in this scene include the Friend’s Block, the two-story brick building that stands in the distance in the right-center of the photos, at the corner of Main and Walden Streets. It was built in 1892, making it one of the newer structures here on this section of Main Street. On the other side of the street, on the far right of both photos, is the Union Block at 18-26 Main Street. Like Garty’s Block across the street, it was built with a mansard roof, but in this case the roof has been retained, and the exterior of the building has not changed significantly over the years.

Although very little has changed here since the first photo was taken, this block of Main Street faced the possibility of demolition during the early 20th century. In the late 1920s, cement manufacturer Albert Y. Gowen purchased many of these properties, with the intention of demolishing all of them and replacing them with new colonial-style buildings. Gowen had been inspired by the newly-reconstructed Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia, and he hoped to create something similar here, with a Main Street lined with faux-colonial shops. However, this plan faced significant opposition, including from some of the property owners who refused to sell, and Gowen ultimately abandoned his plans. As a result, Concord continues to have a town center filled with authentic 19th century buildings, as opposed to entirely fabricated 18th century ones.

Wright’s Tavern, Concord, Mass (1)

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Wright’s Tavern, seen from Lexington Road in Concord, around 1910-1920. Image courtesy of the Library of Congress, Detroit Publishing Company Collection.

The scene in 2018:

This tavern has stood at the center of Concord for nearly 275 years, since its construction in 1747. It was built by Ephraim Jones, who ran the tavern here for several years before selling the property to Thomas Munroe in 1751. After Munroe’s death in 1766, it was purchased by Daniel Taylor, and he went on to own it for the next nine years. During this time, in the years leading up to the American Revolution, the tavern served as a popular gathering place for locals. These included the militiamen who met regularly on the nearby training field for drills, as well as congregants from the neighboring First Parish Church.

The tavern came to be known as Wright’s Tavern because of Amos Wright, who was the proprietor during the mid-1770s. Although he did not own the property, he ran the tavern, and it was during his tenure here that several historic events occurred. The first of these came in October 1774, when the Massachusetts Provincial Congress met in Concord. Earlier in the month, the colonial legislature had been dissolved as part of the so-called Intolerable Acts, but its members ignored this directive and met anyway, convening in Concord on October 7. The Congress itself met in the First Parish Church, with John Hancock presiding, but the tavern was used for committee meetings, in addition to providing food and drink for the 300 delegates in attendance.

Just six months later, Wright’s Tavern again found itself at the center of revolutionary activities in Massachusetts. In the early morning hours of April 19, 1775, Concord minutemen gathered here in advance of the approaching British forces, which were attempting to seize colonial military supplies that were stored here in town. Later in the day, these minutemen retreated to the north of town, on the other side of Old North Bridge, where they fired the famous “Shot heard round the world.”

In the meantime, though, the British temporarily occupied the center of Concord, and Major John Pitcairn made the tavern his headquarters. From here, he dispatched search parties in a largely unsuccessful attempt to find the military supplies. He also reportedly ordered a drink here at the tavern, which he is said to have stirred with his finger while declaring that he would “stir the damned Yankee blood” in the same manner by nightfall. However, as it turned out, the colonial minutemen defeated the British at Old North Bridge, and Pitcairn and his men were forced to retreat to Boston. Pitcairn returned safely, but he was ultimately killed two months later at the Battle of Bunker Hill.

After the war, the old tavern became a bakery, with residential space for the baker on the upper floor. Starting in 1790, the bakery was run by Francis Jarvis, and it became a fixture here in the center of Concord for many years. Jarvis sold baked goods out of the building here, but part of his business also involved a wagon route that sold bread, pies, and other goods throughout the surrounding towns. His son, Francis Jr., was born here in 1794, and he would later become a partner in the bakery before taking it over from his father in 1824. The younger Francis operated the bakery for another seven years, before selling the property in 1831.

Over the next few decades, the building housed a variety of commercial tenants, ranging from the print shop to the manufacturer of Potter’s Hair Balm. By the late 19th century, the building was in poor condition, but in the 1880s it was purchased by Reuben Rice and former U.S. Attorney General Ebenezer Hoar, with the goal of preserving the historic structure. They then donated it to the First Parish Church, and it was subsequently converted back to its original use as an inn.

The first photo was taken around 30 years later, showing the old colonial-era tavern at the dawn of the automobile age. One such car is visible on the right side of the photo, with a group of occupants climbing into it, presumably after staying at the hotel or eating in its dining room. The exterior of the building is covered with a variety of signs, attesting to its historical significance as well as the amenities offered here. Another sign, located at the corner on the left side, indicates that it is an “Automobile Red Book Station.”

Today, around a century after the first photo was taken, the exterior of the tavern remains essentially the same as it did back then. It is still owned by the church, although it is no longer used as a hotel. Instead, part of the building is used by the Concord Museum for educational space, and another part of the building is occupied by two architectural firms. Because of its historical significance, the tavern was named as a National Historic Landmark in 1961, making it one of six sites in Concord to receive this level of recognition.