When I saw the prompt photo for this week’s Sepia Saturday, my mind immediately went to an old postcard in the collection because it had a very similar feel to it, even if the man in my photo isn’t running away. I’ve posted the front and back of the postcard which has a stamp, but no cancellation or message on the back of the postcard. I have to imagine that someone meant to send it, but never quite got around to it. The stamp is dated to 1954, which helps date the postcard as well. With a town name like, “Coalport,” in Pennsylvania, you can be sure that the main industry was coal. The majority of my family that comes from that area were coal miners. I posted another old photo of family members who were coal miners here, if you’re interested. Awful jobs, terrible conditions, and perhaps at times, they wanted to run away from it all. As far as the orientation of the photo, on the far left side of the photo, about dead center horizontally, there’s a church. The church is the one in the Google Street View just below the postcard. I know I’ve driven down that street before when out visiting family, so I’ll have to see if I can go back out and set up a photo similar to the postcard and do some comparison!
The first thing I noticed about that first postcard picture – other than the man or boy standing in the foreground – was the bridge in the middle of town. There’s just something quaint & appealing to me about a bridge in the middle of a town or village.
There’s something very appealing about the photo. The town itself has a nice shape and the kid has hands on hips.
Good match to the theme photo.
You’re right, there’s a similar feel and the lone figure in the foreground surveying the landscape makes it far more interesting. I was raised in a mining community in Nottinghamshire and life could certainly be grim at times for the miners and their families
A lovely photo of the boy overlooking the town. It doesn’t look as if the church has changed much over the years. My husband’s 3x great uncle Dr George Washington Calwell lived in Glen Hope, about 10 minutes away and some descendants still live in the area.
Towns that grew up around a single industry whether coal or the railroad are just fascinating to me. You can imagine the people starting a business out of a need and the community that supported one another both in business and as neighbors.