The Blackington Collection — a priceless collection of 2,000 glass-plate negatives that captured New England life from the 1890s through the 1930s — had been forgotten in a box in the cellar of Yankee’s offices. Then they were rescued. They’ll often start, ‘I have a funny question. You may not be interested, but …’” As the […]
Chewing the fat around the woodstove in the Cilley General Store, Plymouth Notch, Vermont, February 1926. President Calvin Coolidge’s father, John, owned the building from the late 1860s until 1917. Son Calvin was born in 1872 in the house attached to the back of the store, and as president used the store’s second-floor hall as his office during summer breaks from Washington.
Photo Credit : Yankee Publishing Collection/Historic New England
The Blackington Collection — a priceless collection of 2,000 glass-plate negatives that captured New England life from the 1890s through the 1930s — had been forgotten in a box in the cellar of Yankee’s offices. Then they were rescued.
They’ll often start, ‘I have a funny question. You may not be interested, but …’” As the senior curator of Historic New England’s archive, Lorna Condon fields countless phone calls from people concerned about the future of their most personal treasures. Family Bibles, paisley shawls, albums of vacation photos—Condon has welcomed them all into her collection. Although the reasons for the donations vary—a death in the family, or the selling of a home, perhaps—she says it usually boils down to one common sentiment: “I really want to find the right home for it.”
The photos you see on these pages come from Yankee’s own donation to Historic New England, the Boston-based preservation society. Like Condon’s other petitioners, we just wanted to find a better place for them than their previous home, which until the 1980s was a box, forgotten and molding in the cellar of Yankee’s offices in Dublin, New Hampshire.
The collection—around 2,000 glass-plate negatives dating from the 1890s through the 1930s—is a relic from this magazine’s early days. In the 1960s the editors bought up vintage negatives to use as stock photography. In the collection you’ll find idyllic landscapes and portraits alongside documentary news photos, many taken by early New England photojournalist Alton Blackington, for whom the collection is named. Most of these photos were packaged into nostalgic coffee-table books with titles like Yankees Remember: Stories and Pictures of Good Old Days in New England as Remembered by Old-Time Yankees. But by the 1970s, they had fallen out of use and were bundled away into a dark corner, lost for a decade until stumbled upon by our then-archivist, Lorna Trowbridge, daughter of Yankee’s founder, Robb Sagendorph.
She catalogued and cared for the negatives, but in terms of publishing, they received little more use than they had in the cellar. (By the 1980s, Yankee wasn’t printing that many photos of Calvin Coolidge.) Like most things kept for sentimental reasons, they were, to us, effectively useless, but we couldn’t just get rid of them. Some things don’t go in the trash.
Condon notes that although Historic New England doesn’t take everything it’s offered, she always ends up thanking callers: not for the donations, but for being conscientious about finding a proper home for their collections, for stopping to consider that someone else might be interested in their stories and objects, and for not just throwing them away.
You see, this is the first step in building an archive. There are climate-controlled rooms in every museum and library across the country filled with things that someone, somewhere, sometime, decided not to chuck into a dumpster. Preservation starts at home. Every one of us is a frontline archivist, each time we hold something back from a tag sale, explaining to our spouse, “No, no, I think I want to keep this,” or, on moving day, when we stand indecisively over a box of mementos, still sealed from the last move, but, with a sigh, finally set our creaking back to hoisting it onto the truck, bound for some new attic to haunt.
There are reasons why some things survive the countless purges of our lives, and it is exactly those reasons that Lorna Condon is most interested in hearing. She recalls one seemingly bizarre donation, a bundle of 250 greeting cards. With it came a memoir from the woman who’d kept them, explaining what each had meant to her when she and her family received it. And just like that, a story elevated into history something that many would consider rubbish. “If we can put the story with the objects, that’s really what’s important to us,” Condon explains. “It’s the story of why these things are saved.”
But for some artifacts, that’s just the beginning. They continue to tell us tales long after those who donated them are gone. That can be especially true of photographs. Though the pictures remain the same, their meanings have a tendency to shift over time. “We bring our own sensibilities, our own perceptions, to images,” Condon says. “It’s an ongoing revelation when you work with a photographic archive.”
She produces two photos of the same building as an example. It’s an impressive, cupola-topped house in Dorchester, Massachusetts. In the first image, shot in the 1870s, the foreground is filled with people in country finery, genteelly enjoying a game of lawn tennis. In the second, shot in the 1960s, the lawn is replaced by a bleak street. Steel fire escapes rudely bolted to the home’s façade indicate that it has been divided into a boardinghouse. “When you put those two photographs together, the story becomes so much more complex,” Condon says. “What happened to that neighborhood in the 90 years between the first photograph and the second? There’s a tremendous amount of history and story there.”
And what story do Yankee’s photos tell us? They remain an immersive window into New England life in the early 20th century, but perhaps their most interesting tale is the one they tell about the changing tastes of the magazine’s editors. Those coffee-table books left out many of the images from the 1920s and ’30s, presumably because they weren’t “old-time” enough. Why show a Model T when you can show a horse and buggy? But those same images neglected by our 1960s progenitors are the very ones that make 21st-century editors swoon, which I suppose is evidence that not even nostalgia is immune to the changing hand of progress. Our sentimental connections to the past keep marching along beside us: our constant companions and baggage.
That is, of course, until they aren’t. Until the day comes when we just can’t justify lifting that box onto yet another moving truck, or when we really do need that extra space in the cellar. Until that day when we decide to unburden ourselves of the responsibility of being the only one who remembers, and we place a call to someone like Lorna Condon to see whether it’s time for our personal history to become part of everyone’s history. It may seem like a funny question, and she may not be interested. But …sWho was Alton Blackington?
Alton Blackington (1893–1963) was a Yankee after our own heart. Remembered by his son as “a barefoot boy from Rockland, Maine, who never forgot his roots,” he built his career—and a fair amount of fame—by chronicling and celebrating the stories of New Englanders. He began his career as a photojournalist for the Boston Herald, rising to prominence with his on-the-ground reporting of the Hurricane of ’38. By that time, he’d also branched out into radio, in 1933, with his long-running program Yankee Yarns, on which he regaled his audience with the lore and history of New England, accompanied by as much folksy charm as you’d expect. He later produced a book with the same title and its sequel, More Yankee Yarns. Blackington’s close friendship with Yankee founder and editor Robb Sagendorph facilitated the donation of his photos and papers to the magazine after his death. At the time, Sagendorph wrote that the acquisition represented “one of the finest collections of New Englandiana in existence.” —J.S.Historic New England holds a vast archive of images from across the region, many of which are accessible online at: historic newengland.org/collections-archives-exhibitions/collections-access/highlights/photography. See more archival shots from HNE’s Yankee Publishing Collection at: YankeeMagazine.com/historic-photos
The UMass Amherst Libraries host the exhibit “Yankee Yarns: True Tales of New England Characters from the 1920s and 1930s,” through Monday, June 8, 2015.
Justin Shatwell
Justin Shatwell is a longtime contributor to Yankee Magazine whose work explores the unique history, culture, and art that sets New England apart from the rest of the world. His article, The Memory Keeper (March/April 2011 issue), was named a finalist for profile of the year by the City and Regional Magazine Association.