1910s–1920s Photo Album from California, Showing Farming, Recreation, and Trips to Hydroelectric Projects.
California: c. 1915–1921. Photo album measuring 10 x 12 inches, containing approximately 360 photographs. Photos are approximately 3 ½ x 4 ½ and smaller with very good to excellent contrast. Album with wear to covers and edges of pages; photos generally excellent to Near Fine. Item #List3510
A photo album belonging to an unknown Southern California family; license plates date the album to about 1914 to 1921. Most of the photographs are of family life, including farm work: piles of hay; cows, pigs, chickens, turkeys, and horse-drawn plows; gigantic watermelons; and family members posing outside vineyards and in cornfields. The family also documented their car and their recreational activities, including swimming, hiking, and fishing, picnics, and carriage rides. It appears that they were quite proud of their car, and were frequent “auto-campers.” They seem to have taken a trip to Mexico or the Southwest, as some shots show wide desert landscapes, Joshua trees, and low, Spanish colonial-era buildings.
Identifiable subjects include the ferry boat Ramona; the Rose Parade in Pasadena (showing Culver City, Pasadena, and Glendale floats); San Gorgonio Mountain, Half Dome, and the Wawona Tree, a giant sequoia in Yosemite; and the Fairview Farm Club parade—a line of cars driving down a dirt road, the first decorated with cornstalks—which is probably related to the ranching development located between Huntington Beach and Newport Beach.
Someone in the family had an interest in hydroelectric power, as many shots show ongoing or completed hydroelectric works projects in Southern California. Several show the Southern California Edison Big Creek plant. Located in the Sierra Nevada, the Pacific Light & Power Corporation began the Big Creek project in 1910 to provide power to the growing metropolis of Los Angeles. The photographs in this album appear to include both exterior and interior shots. Another set of shots show a dam under construction; this may be Devil’s Gate Dam on the Arroyo Seco, which was constructed in 1920.
Of interest to historians of Southern California in the early twentieth century, and some of its public works projects.
Price: $750.00