How museum pictures city

Published 1:24 pm Thursday, October 6, 2005

By By JOHN EBY / Dowagiac Daily News
With then-and-now photos, Ann Thompson, director of The Museum at Southwestern Michigan College, Wednesday night showed some of the byproducts of the detective work it took to create the "Images of Dowagiac" book with Curator of History Steve Arseneau.
Certainly if you're from Dowagiac you know the Conklin house.
And the Frank Richey house on Mill Street.
Or one of the city's oldest places, the Larzelere house.
The Conklin house is the large, extensively remodeled residence on Green Street at W. Telegraph.
Records indicated the Richeys lived on Mill Street, but Thompson couldn't locate the house. "Barb Deuel said it's on Orchard (at W. Telegraph) and I thought we misidentified it. But then we found out it's been moved."
The 1900 census, in fact, shows the Richeys on Mill Street. A 1906 Cadillac helps pinpoint the date.
The Larzelere house has been painted yellow and is on W. Telegraph Street at its corner with Hamilton. A 1914 photo shows Arthur Larzelere, 47, outside the dwelling in a snowstorm.
They delve into these mysteries from different directions, including city directories from 1899, high school yearbooks, census records, the Daily News on microfilm, genealogy Web sites such as ancestry.com and museum files.
While the authors are pleased with the cover, it wasn't their first choice. "But in retrospect it captures the essence of the industrial base that made Dowagiac what it was," Arseneau figures.
It fell to Maxwell Abrokwah, a pharmacy student from Ghana, to devote two years to scanning the museum's 4,500 photographs and 500 postcards into a digital database. Notecards with some images will soon be available in the museum gift shop on SMC's Dowagiac campus.
Photos from the collection are available for reproduction for a fee.
The project took from Thompson submitting the proposal last December until March.
Low-resolution (100 dpi) scans for reference purposes enable Arseneau to zip through hundreds of images instantly.
Arseneau demonstrated SMC's image management software, with an array of folders with hundreds of thumbnail pictures. With the click of a mouse a photo can be enlarged to examine details.
Researchers can make an appointment to access a computer screen.
Thompson found the publisher, Arcadia, in Chicago.
They wrote introductions for each chapter. "We had to come up with themes," Arseneau explained. "A New Community" offered the earliest Dowagiac photos, including Wheat Day 1860 (looking from about Wood Fire toward Beeson Street and Bigelow's warehouse, furniture and cabinetry) and the American House Hotel in the 1870s.
Wheat Day "is a great first image of Dowagiac," Arseneau said, "because it melds in two key industries that made Dowagiac come up - the railroad and agriculture."
Except for the huge hole, excavation for the Beckwith Theatre in 1892 shows a downtown very similar. There are horses laboring at the bottom and spectators gathered to watch a mason.
Dowagiac, established in 1858, celebrated its sesquicentennial in 1998.
Thompson showed "Agricultural Roots," illustrated with a photo that includes Garold Engle - or at least his legs. "Making a Buck in Dowagiac" chronicles businesses, such as lanky E.E. Alliger and his steam laundry.
Other chapters are "Furnace City," "Friends and Family," "At Home," "The ABCs of Dowagiac Schools" (the 1870 graduating class consisted of four young men), "A Sports Town" (picturing the 1909 girls high school basketball team) and "Fairs, Festivals and Fun."
Despite its pivotal role in Dowagiac's development, whole books have chronicled James Heddon's Sons and the lures and fishing tackle it made here until 1984, so there's only one photo.
Photos rejected for the book were, however, incorporated into the companion exhibit, "Images of Dowagiac."
Their book spans the 1860s to the end of World War II, which left the 1953 Dowagiac Dolls baseball team on the cutting room floor.
Arseneau told how they decided to keep one picture over another in winnowing a couple thousand Dowagiac images to 200 and assigning them to a particular chapter.
The authors often found themselves in "negotiation mode," he said. "I'll give you Thomas Jefferson Martin for Nicholas Bock."
One intriguing photo thanks to Arseneau's expertise shows Dowagiac Manufacturing employees. It's not noticeable until he points it out, but each man grips a tool, probably to represent his trade - saws, brooms, hammers.
A picture of six happy men riding in the "Famous Dowagiac Truck" is made all the more tragic by the rest of the story. It was taken in LaPorte, Ind., in 1909 - the day before a collision with an interurban killed four of them, including Dowagiac Motor Car Co. co-owners Frank Lake and Leon Lyle. The two survivors had taken the train home.
The collaborators selected a picture of wheat threshing at the Emmons farm because it included a chute emptying into a sack.
While extending their search to the community might have turned up an even more amazing assortment of images, they decided to confine the project to SMC to "showcase the museum's collection," Arseneau said.
An exterior of Gebhard Shoe Store was rejected in favor of a view inside. "Interior store shots are a little bit rarer," Arseneau said.
Missing the cut were a photo of Dr. Conkey's horse ambulance and a postcard of the Indian Lake steamer Fenetta L.
An elegantly dressed woman was rejected because the picture was made at Barron Lake, as was another taken at Sumnerville.
Sam Snell's cigar factory just fell into the category of "tough choices" when it missed inclusion.