Many of the Erie Canal images we use here came from vintage postcards. Today we have texts and tweets. In the earliest years of the twentieth century though, they had penny postcards. Three things came together in the early 1900’s in this country that created a social phenomenon not unlike texting and tweets: Sending and collecting penny postcards between friends. First was the speed of postal transit because of our sophisticated rail system. Second was a photo-colorizing technique called “lithography” that had reached a high level in especially Germany. And the third was the advancement of photographic technology that put cameras in the hands of thousands of would-be photographers in America. The result is an immense photo-record of thousands of often obscure scenes that otherwise might never have been preserved for posterity. We use dozens of them in our videos and here on this website.
Oops! The Germans did their best with the photos sent by the American photographers. Unfortunately, the pictures were in black and white. Without detailed instructions they sometimes guessed wrong on the colors of buildings, roofs, etc. In the case of this photo showing the “widewaters” at Rochester, they wiped out thousands of homes and businesses altogether off in the distance. Lake Ontario is out there, but it’s at least four miles beyond those sailboats. Plus, there is no large land mass beyond the beach like that. The top of the original photo must have been overexposed or obscured by fog, and checking a map of the US the Germans saw Lake Ontario up there on a map, and decided to repair the damaged area accordingly. Nope: No sailboats there. None at all.