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Description
A rare original antique photograph photographed by Jorns and Harrod Art Palace showing the extensive cleanup after a rather harsh storm notated as being in the 1880’s. The workers are seen below the railroad bridge roping and tying logs and debris to clear the channel and bridge support pillars.
The area of this photograph was noted by the former owner as being Jennings County on the Muscatatuck River in Indiana.
This great photograph measures 8 x 9 ½ inches.
Brief History the Jorns & Harrod Palace Art Car: Hundreds of itinerant photographers sprang up in nineteenth century America, particularly in small towns whose limited populations and economies could not support resident photographers. Some traveled by wagons, while others rode the rails, plied the rivers, or endured dusty, rutted roads in carriages or stage coaches, stopping to herald their arrival and peddle their photographs to the locals. So it was that photographers Frederick Jorns and William L. Harrod of Girard, Illinois, established a resident photographic studio and a mobile studio which traveled the rails, stopping at towns in Illinois and Kentucky and Indiana One photo in a museum collection shows that the traveling studio of Jorns and Harrod was a modified baggage-passenger car. It was pulled by an engine from the Pittsburgh Cincinnati-Chicago & St. Louis R.R., with a coal/wood tandem car. The studio car was labeled with signs “Jorns & Harrod Palace Art Car Photographs, Views of All Kinds, Photos of Children Our Specialty.” The Earlington Bee (of uncertain date), published in that western Kentucky mining town, carried a small ad and three promos of the Jorns-Harrod studio in the community. It noted that the studio had been in town “for several days . . . and [has] been doing a considerable amount of work.” Readers were urged to “call at the Palace art car and see the fine lot of photographs they are showing. They guarantee their work to equal that of any city studio.”
REF: Container 20
