Ohio

John Jakle

Description

The first half of the 20th century was a period of great change along the historic Ohio River corridor. It was then that the Ohio became the most heavily engineered river in the world, facilitating its use as an artery of commerce. It was also a period of great change in transportation as different means of travel appeared along the margins of this storied waterway. And it was the era of the picture postcard, in which postcard publishing companies chose views for the public to buy and share with family and friends via the United States Postal Service.All of these themes are woven together through a full-color display of more than 150 historic postcards that takes the reader along a 981-mile journey from the industrial colossus of Pittsburgh, past its trailing southern elements, and into the mining and agricultural areas on the way to Cincinnati, once known as Porkopolis. From there, postcards offer views of Louisville, once the tobacco capital of the United States, and through interesting but less famous places on the way to Cairo, Illinois, where the Ohio meets the "Father of Waters," the Mississippi River, on more than equal terms.Employing this unique collection of historic postcards as both artifacts and images, authors John Jakle and Dannel McCollum effectively illustrate the importance of the Ohio River in American history.

Sujets

• Histoire
• USA
• United States of America
• Local history
• Historical geography
• Midwestern United States
• History of the Americas
• États-Unis
• Ohio

Informations

• Publié par: The Kent State University Press
• Date de parution: 30 novembre 2017
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781631012808
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 8 Mo

Extrait

The Ohio
The Historic River in  Vintage Postcard Art, 1900–1960                  
John A. Jakle • Dannel McCollum
THE KENT STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Kent, Ohio
For Rita Kohn and Robert Espeseth for their shared devotion to the Ohio River .
© 2017 by The Kent State University Press, Kent, Ohio
44242
All rights reserved
Library of Congress Catalog Number 2016055033
ISBN 978-1-60635-316-5
Manufactured in Korea
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Jakle, John A., author. | McCollum, Dannel Angus, author.
Title: The Ohio : the historic river in vintage postcard art / John A. Jakle, Dannel McCollum.
Description: Kent, Ohio : The Kent State University Press, 2017. | “This book grew out of Always A River: The Ohio River and the American Experience, a multifacted celebration with conferences, a book publication, and, most importantly, a floating exhibition sent down the Ohio”--Preface. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016055033 | ISBN 9781606353165 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781631012815 (epdf)
Subjects: LCSH: Ohio River--Pictorial works. | Ohio River Valley--Pictorial works | Postcards--Ohio.
Classification: LCC F516.J35 2017 | DDC 977.0022/2--dc23
LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016055033
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Contents
  Preface   Introduction One Pittsburgh Two Pittsburgh to Wheeling Three Wheeling to Huntington Four Huntington to Cincinnati Five Cincinnati to Louisville Six Louisville to Evansville Seven Evansville to Cairo   Epilogue   References   Index
Preface
This book grew out of Always a River: The Ohio River and the American Experience , a multifaceted celebration with conferences, a book publication, and, most importantly, a floating exhibition sent down the Ohio (see Reid [1991] 2010). 1 In the summer of 1991, a barge traveled the length of the river starting in Pittsburgh and stopping at various towns and cities along the 981-mile distance to Cairo, where the Ohio joins the Mississippi. A year later, tourist agencies in southern Illinois met to discuss how best to promote tourism, agreeing that the Ohio River represented a most significant underutilized resource, one potentially inviting to tourism. An ad hoc group formed, comprising individuals from across the Ohio Valley representing local visitor and convention bureaus, planning offices, and historical societies as well as regional organizations concerned with the entire Ohio watershed, such as the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the Ohio Valley Water Sanitation Commission. 2 The group’s goal was to secure Congressional designation of the Ohio River as a national heritage corridor under the auspices of the U.S. National Park Service. Such designation was seen as a starting point for getting various state and local agencies working together to promote the river’s historic and scenic resources.
Bills were introduced in both houses of Congress. Although the governors of Illinois, Indiana, and Kentucky, along with the mayors of many of the cities along the river, offered support, the bills died in committee. Perhaps the primary reason for this was failure of many government officials, especially at the state level, to truly appreciate the regional, let alone the national, significance of the Ohio River. They could not see that every locale along the river shared a common heritage, one that could and should be recognized as a basis for planning not only tourism but economic development generally. They failed to get on board.
Over recent decades both scholarly and popular writing about the Ohio River has tended to be local or topical in focus. Localities or river-related topics get emphasized, but not the river and its heritage as a whole. Overall, historical scholarship has focused not so much on the twentieth century as on the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when the Ohio River served as one of the great migration paths westward. Through the late nineteenth century, the river was a great artery of commerce, sustaining substantive industrialization and urbanization. However, basic questions regarding the more recent past remain largely unasked and unanswered, diminishing the nation’s awareness today of the Ohio River’s continued importance in the American experience.
Herein we ask basic questions about the early twentieth-century river, using vintage postcard art to illustrate what the Ohio River, and especially the towns and cities along its margins, were seen to be. What did vintage postcard art suggest? What were residents, and also visitors to the Ohio River, invited to visualize its environs fifty and more years ago? Such inquiry today ought to promote better understanding of, and greater appreciation for, what survives from the past along the river. Ohio River resources, of both the natural and human-built kind, deserve to be carefully managed. Ohio River history deserves to be marshaled as part of that process. The Ohio River merits greater recognition as a national resource.
We have assembled 169 postcard views, most dating from 1900 through the 1950s. Only a few images date thereafter; these are included not only to show what was pictured but to illustrate how postcard imagery changed over time. So also do they suggest what was not pictured, thus inviting commentary. Postcards were originally produced through lithographic and similar printing processes, but after World War II, photochromes, a kind of photographic print, proved cheaper. Substantive alteration of images was possible with lithographic cards: features not originally photographed were regularly dubbed in and some elements, particularly unsightly things, were routinely omitted. Lithographic images were made through multiple overlays: an initial printing in black and white with subsequent printings in different colors. Postcards of the Detroit Publishing Company, using a Swiss patent, involved a dozen or more printings and are today generally considered the finest ever sold in the United States. With color photochromes, however, postcard scenes are pictured as originally photographed. Early photochromes tended to lack the sharpness or clarity of their predecessors.
Initially, most of the postcards sold in the United States were printed in Europe, certainly those of the lithographic kind that big-city publishing houses distributed. Because they controlled key patents, Europeans early dominated high quality visual reproduction. By the 1920s, most American postcard publishers did their own printing. Important in the transfer of European printing technology to the United States was Chicago’s Curt Teich & Company, a firm made famous in the 1930s and 1940s for its highly altered and brightly colored cards printed on linen paper. 3 We have listed publishers for each card where available. For brief histories of postcard publishing, see Postcards of the Night: Views of American Cities (Jakle 2003, 24–31, 118–20) and Picturing Illinois: Twentieth-Century Postcard Art from Chicago to Cairo (Jakle and Sculle 2012, 16–21).
Most of the older postcard views selected for this book were derived originally from black-and-white photographs. They were then subsequently colored through multiple lithographic color overlays. In the printing process this produced some minor distortions. Still, the images remained relatively true to scenes depicted. Additionally, early postcard photographs were for the most part carefully composed, the viewer thus encouraged to see landscapes and places only in specific ways. Also included in our postcard array are images made directly from black-and-white negatives. Photographic paper was available to amateur photographers, enabling them to easily turn snapshots into postcards for mailing. Indeed, such could be accomplished using the light of an ordinary table lamp. Commercial photographers, especially those located in small towns that were little affected by big-city postcard publishers, produced mainly black-and-white prints to create postcard sets for local sale, thus augmenting their portraiture, news photography, and other business.
In the chapters that follow, localities are pictured southward from Pittsburgh, as if the reader were traveling downstream, like the Always a River barge. Selected images highlight the differences and similarities from place to place, together creating an overall view of the river and informing viewers of change over time. Readers familiar with the Ohio Valley will readily appreciate how much survives along the river from the early twentieth century. Many, however, will be appalled by what does not. All readers, we think, will be intrigued by what once was, and, more importantly, by what was thought to be—so much so that they will want to see today’s river for themselves, thus to marvel at the past and think about the future. Vintage postcards represent a kind of time machine: a window on history. They offer an invitation to step inside a past view, look around, and, of course, assess.
The postcard arrived on the American scene about 1900, exciting an enthusiasm for sending and collecting postcard art that did not subside for decades. Postcards sold in the billions. Scenic postcards, as a form of popular culture, substantially affected how Americans conceptualized their nation’s geography, especially in terms of landscapes and places. Postcards suggested what was important to an area and how those things ought best be viewed. Thus they reveal to us today what Americans were once expected to value and respect not only nature’s handiwork but also that of the human-built world. Postcard views provided a shared cultural experience through which Americans could better relate to one another.
Early on, the Ohio River was a major route for settlers moving west beyond the Appalachians, but it was also deemed the River Jordan for slaves escaping north. Following initial settlement, it was an engine for industrialization and ur