Museum seminar helps put a date to those intriguing old photographs
Zeroing in on vintage car frames, exterior building architecture, peoples’ clothing and even their hair styles can provide clues to helping date old pictures.
These clues and other details, such as commercial business signage, landscapes, traffic signal lights, street paving and other images found in old photographs provided the focal point of a three-hour Texarkana Museum Systems workshop Saturday at the P.J. Ahern Home Museum.
TMS Curator Jamie Simmons used historic downtown photos of Texarkana to walk her audience through the process of finding those details.
Using an undated pre-Depression Era photo of downtown Texarkana, Simmons explained how she was able to determined that the photo had been taken at some point between 1924 and 1927.
“With a picture like this, the best thing you can do is start off with looking for things you recognize in the photo,” she said.
Simmons pointed out that the downtown’s original federal post office in the photo (first constructed in 1893, before being torn down to make way for the current post office built
through the federal government’s Works Progress Administration program in 1933) demonstrated one of the more recognizable structures to start with when determining an approximate date.
Simmons then pointed out the Hotel Grim, constructed in 1924, as another familiar structure as well as the three-story Foreman Building sitting just east, across North State Line Avenue from the Grim. She explained that the Foreman building (originally built in 1901), which many residents may now know as a one-story Harrelson law firm, continued to have its three floors until a devastating fire consumed its two upper floors in 1952.
Just north of the Grim, Simmons then focused on the old two-story Rialto Building built in 1904, which many now know as old Medical Arts building ever since it underwent an exterior stucco makeover—perhaps before the 1940s.
Finally, using what she knew about additions to the original Offenhauser Insurance building before it became the city’s main museum building, she showed how she could limit the photo to have been taken within that three-year sandwich of time (1924-27).
Besides building construction timelines, Simmons also said that car shapes, frame and other designs, particularly in the 1920s and 30s, lend ample evidence to a photos age.
As for 19th Century photo dating, Simmons said men’s clothing styles and designs evolved much slower than for women, but she added that hair styles for women also varied a lot more than they did for men.
“Clothes for kids of both genders just basically took on a miniature form of what adults wore,” she said. “You will always run into some road blocks when it comes to dating photos, but even records like property deeds and old city directories can provide aid.”