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This photo was shot from Eighth Street looking up Federal Street toward the Leftwich house at the top of the hill on the right. The boy on the left appears in the other photo as well. Photo ca. 1899 from the album of Marian Tucker Clark
One Image Leads to Another BY NANCY BLACKWELL MARION
It started with a photograph. Not an old photo, but a new shot of Mari- anne Rhodes making ham biscuits in
her kitchen. While photographing the author for her new cookbook, I chatted with her about her family. Turns out, Marianne comes from a very old local family of Clarks, Withers, Lovings, and
Faulkners. Her grandmother, Marian Tucker Clark, had kept a photo album at the end of the nineteenth century, and Marianne showed it to me.
The small, black book contained beautiful pictures—really what many old Lynchburg family albums showed—of babies, couples, dogs, and chickens. They were all fairly small, four to a page, except for the very end of the album. There I saw two full-page scenes, surpris- ing more for their subject matter than for their size. One was a picture of two young black boys, smiling from the back of a wagon that was headed up a dirt street. The environs were not recogniz- able to me. The other, however, was mys- teriously familiar. In it, one of the young
boys stood on the side of a dirt street with a row of low, frame houses behind him. The photograph was captioned “Leftwich Row, Federal Street, Lynch- burg, Virginia.”
While it didn’t look like any place I could think of on Federal Street, it did remind me of a drawing I had seen from exactly the same period, one that had puzzled me for years. An 1895 pencil sketch titled Negro Street, Lynchburg, Va. by Bernhard Gutmann showed the same style of buildings—small, closely spaced, frame houses with double porches. The sketch had been included in a book about the artist, Bernhard Gutmann: An American Impressionist by Percy North (1995).The location was evident once
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