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    Around Brockport
    Around Brockport
    Around Brockport
    Ebook179 pages1 hour

    Around Brockport

    By William G. Andrews

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    About this ebook

    Throughout the 20th century, Brockport residents and visitors shared their experiences, sending postcards of the town to friends and family. These postcards
    present the important places and events that made visitors come back year after year and made residents proud to call the town home. This book complements the author's pictorial history Around Brockport in Arcadia Publishing's Images of America series. Along with Brockport, the towns of Sweden, Clarkson, and Hamlin are included in this extraordinary collection of postcards. The vintage postcards in this volume span a century of the area's history, presenting a portrait of the streets, buildings, events, and disasters that impacted the time and preserving the memories of the past for future generations.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArcadia Publishing
    Release dateMay 12, 2008
    ISBN9781439620403
    Around Brockport
    Author

    William G. Andrews

    William Andrews is a retired college professor, member of the Western Monroe Historical Society, founding president of the Brockport Historical Museum, a chair on the Brockport Historic Preservation Board, and a village trustee since 2012.

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    • 4/5
      William G. Andrews’s Around Brockport, as part of the Images of America series, uses photographs and historic drawings to tell the story of a community, in this case the communities that made up the Triangle Tract purchase west of Rochester. Andrews, an historian of Brockport, focuses on the towns of Sweden and Clarkson, the village of Brockport, and the college in Brockport, later part of the State University of New York. Photographs focus on historic figures, buildings, landscapes, and technology, with several side-by-side comparisons to show a century or more’s worth of change. Like Andrews’s Brockport Through Time, this consists primarily of photographs with explicatory captions and will appeal to residents of Brockport and its surrounding communities and will also make a nice gift for recent graduates from the College at Brockport.Andrews has written several previous books about Brockport’s history, including Early Brockport (2005, published on the occasion of the village’s 175th anniversary), Civil War Brockport: A Canal Town and the Union Army (2013, part of the History Press’s Civil War Series), and Brockport in the Age of Modernization: 1866-1916 (2018, part of the America Through Time series). For those interested more specifically in the history of SUNY Brockport, The Campus History Series’ State University of New York at Brockport by Mary Jo Gigliotti, W. Bruce Leslie, and Kenneth P. O’Brien will make an equally appealing read.

    Book preview

    Around Brockport - William G. Andrews

    generosity.

    INTRODUCTION

    This book attempts to portray the history of Brockport and its nearby area (especially the towns of Clarkson and Hamlin) by presenting postcards and related material. It shows how postcards were used, historically, in Brockport and how that use reflects Brockport’s history. When I was asked to produce a volume in Arcadia Publishing’s Postcard History series, I demurred at first, as I thought my imagination could not stretch far enough to assemble and present enough postcards different from the images in my book Around Brockport in Arcadia’s Images of America series to fill such a book. But as I reflected on the proposal, I realized that the way postcards portray history has intrinsic interest quite different from the presentation in my pictorial history. Therefore, I accepted the challenge.

    One important way that postcards illustrate the history of Brockport is that they reflect what Brockporters and visitors to Brockport thought was important about the village and the surrounding area. It seems safe to assume that the more postcards on a given topic that have survived, the more importance Brockporters attached to the objects they portray. Many Brockporters and visitors seem to have viewed the downtown commercial district as the most interesting or important part of the village. Therefore, they bought more postcards on that topic than any other. Consequently, a more complete postcard history of downtown Brockport has survived than of anything else in the village. This attitude may still prevail, as the downtown commercial district is the only area of the village on the state and national registers of historic places.

    One very firm limit on the use of photographic postcards to illustrate Brockport’s history is that they did not exist during the first 80 years or so of the village’s existence. Postal cards of one sort or another were accepted for delivery by the U.S. Post Office starting about 1873. Several examples appear on pages 121 through 123. However, the real-photo postcards that are familiar did not appear until about 1900. Thus the history presented on these pages is essentially that of 20th-century Brockport.

    Even after the advent of real-photo postcards, the backs of the cards were reserved for the addresses, so any messages were confined to narrow spaces in the margins or had to be written across the photographs. See pages 12, 23, 29, 47, and 75 for examples. On March 1, 1907, the U.S. Post Office relented and began to accept divided-back postcards, that is, cards with a vertical line down the center of the back of the card. The right half was reserved for the address, but a message could be written on the left side.

    In 1906, Eastman Kodak entered the postcard marketplace by making an affordable camera called the folding pocket camera, with arrangements that enabled photography enthusiasts to have their pictures printed on cards that met the standards of the U.S Post Office. The negatives were the same size as the postcards and the photographers had small metal tools that allowed them to write directly on the image. Thus, a Brockporter could send a verbal message to a relative or friend on one side of a postcard and a visual message on the other. That is why this book includes postcard pictures of the senders’ own houses, automobiles, and so on. See pages 87 through 91 for examples.

    The appearance of the folding pocket camera and the divided-back postcard launched a postcard mania. Sending and collecting real-photo postcards became a national obsession. Postcard collecting, or deltiology, became the most-widespread collecting hobby in history. Every six months, the number of postcards printed doubled. In the first full fiscal year after the introduction of the divided-back postcard, the U.S. Post Office handled 677,770,798 postcards, 7.6 postcards for every man, woman, and child in the country. Because Germany had the best printing technology, about 75 percent of all postcards mailed in the United States before World War I were printed in that country. For examples, see pages 13, 20, 22, and 26.

    During the peak period of postcard mania, Dobson’s drugstore published most of the postcards for Brockport and Clarkson, but not for Hamlin. It churned out a set of eight postcards in 1905 and another set of 137 different real-photo postcards from 1910 to 1912. The E. W. Simmons drugstore also published postcards. Thomas H. Dobson was in business in Brockport from 1876 until his death in 1930. He was also active in civic affairs, serving on the village board of trustees and as mayor. His son Harold joined the firm about 1906 and succeeded his father as proprietor in 1930. Upon Harold’s death in 1965, his daughter-in-law Ruth Stock Dobson ran the business with her brother-in-law Edward Kewin as pharmacist, until it closed in 1967.

    Dobson’s store was first located on the east side of Main Street near the canal. In 1895, he bought out another druggist and moved across the street into the storefront now occupied by Java Junction. The Dobsons performed an invaluable service for Brockport history buffs. They produced for publication those 137 postcards of the village and nearby areas during a short period of time—mainly 1910 to 1912—although a few date from the years immediately before and after that period. Perhaps just as important, they preserved their archives for public use. Harold and Helen Wadsworth Dobson were the official village historians for many years and donated to the village historian’s office the glass negatives from which the postcards had been produced.

    Dobson entered the postcard business on August 31, 1905, with an advertisement in the Brockport Rrpublic that read, 8 Views of Brockport / On Souvenir Postal Cards / Done in Germany by a secret process / Which produces a very rich effect / We are selling them at 20c per set of 8 or 2 for 5c / Come and see them at / The White Drug Store / T. H. Dobson, Prop. However, the cards in Dobson’s 1910 to 1912 series were printed in Great Britain. Also some of his cards and all of Simmons’s cards that are not labeled otherwise probably

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