and this reminds me that history is lost forever unless it's photographed, painted, drawn, or written down.
Everything that has ever happened that wasn't somehow recorded, is nearly unknown to the human race unless some physical example is found. Civilizations have been on this planet, that we know nothing about, until something is discovered about those, and everything that ever happened in the centuries that they existed, is a complete blank.
Like the Khmer Empire in Cambodia between 800 to 1300 A.D. which was largely forgotten by locals... and in WW2, soldiers stumbled across a burial chamber of an unknown civilization in Bulgaria. https://www.nationalgeographic.co.uk/history-and-civilisation/2023/01/soldiers-stumbled-upon-a-2400-year-old-tomb-on-the-battlefields-of-wwii
Anyway, big picture? Unless you write your biography, most everything you ever experienced will be like it never happened the moment you die. My entire paternal family tree was utterly unknown by anyone alive until I did the family tree through Ancestry.com... because no one had recorded it, or anything about anyone in the family. No one knew our last name was chosen when a German ancestor came to the USA and left behind his German family name for something more American, which was very common among European immigrants.
I've seen a lot of steam tractors, but I can't remember ever seeing one with wheel covers.
what a cool arrangement of the people, which beats the hell out of the typical standing about and posing with boredom.
a 1990 feature in LIFE magazine exposed Beachy’s work to the world in a 1990 feature
That's a great story. It's sad that so many of his negatives were lost. I assume Leo was self-taught, so those are some really good photographs.
ReplyDeleteAccording to Ken Burns, there were a lot of Civil War glass negatives left over after the war that no one had any interest in. They used them in greenhouses.
ReplyDeletethat guy is a documentary legend! Interesting reuse of the glass plates, I'm shocked I haven't heard of that until now, thanks!
DeleteThe first shot in that series now looks like this:
ReplyDeletehttps://www.google.com/maps/@39.6966324,-79.1556118,3a,75y,235.82h,92.39t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sHrrKZjuimebMGMqfndKYkg!2e0!7i3328!8i1664
The Victoria Hotel is the white building on the left, according to a postcard I found here:
http://route40.net/page.asp?n=11164
I looked to see where that beautiful stone bridge is now, but can't find it visible in any of the modern-day water crossings in town.