Wednesday, March 17, 2010

Edge of the World?

In working on our town's 75th anniversary I came across a photo in the University of Iowa's digital library collection. It is from the Fred Kent collection and is entitled "Koser addition, Iowa City, Iowa, Nov. 15, 1929"



This photo would pre-date municipal incorporation by 6 years. The picture was taken by Mr. Kent climbing onto the top of the newly constructed Iowa football stadium's west grandstand and shooting to the west.

Foxcroft is visible in the right side of the photo along with the storybook house next door that is shown below:



Go here to see the photo in full 600 DPI glory to scroll around and look at details:

Frederick W. Kent Collection of Photographs, 1866-2000, at the University of Iowa Digital Library

(Be sure to click on the image itself when you get there to see the full image)

To give an idea of change since 1929 here is a google earth image of the same area, the letter "A" is our house, the red dot is the football stadium where the photo was taken.



In another kind of spooky "thinking about the past" conincidence, yesterday Lisa and I were enjoying our spring break by visiting an antique store in Kalona, about 15 miles south of Iowa City. As we were walking around we found a large (4" in diameter) photo button of Helen Fox, which I immediately recognized as her college graduation picture. We knew that many things had gone out of the house while Mick and Helen were still alive, but it was rather unsettling to find that!

2 comments:

Marie said...

I can only imagine how unsettling it was finding that pin in the antique store! On a brighter note, those back-in-time photos are always fun and interesting to come across.

Julie said...

The photo button of Bess in the antique store is spooky! I love it.