a column about Jefferson by Colleen O’Brien
An artist friend of mine came home for All School to see her old friends and to take photos of town and countryside in order to paint pictures of where she came from.
It’s a charming idea, and one I would adopt if I could do it like she does.
Years ago the drug stores in town – Potter’s, Lyon’s, Rexall – carried displays of postcards that pictured each street around the square, every church in town, the Courthouse, the railroad depots.
We need more of this. A first-time visitor to Jefferson this summer asked me to find such postcards so she could show her husband where she’d been. There was a smattering, mostly of the Bell Tower, some of the bike trail.
Worthy though they are, the Mahanay Tower and the Raccoon River Valley Trail are not all there is. I kind of like the mundane stuff – the swings in the park and the diving boards at the pool, a giant oak in Chatauqua Park. There is an old, old picture in my family treasures of Russell Park with a road through it. Mom and Dad, in their dating years, ride bikes along that road, which I believe runs through the park from southwest to northeast.
With the fires we’ve had in the last year, it makes me think that all buildings could be photographed posthaste, because once physically gone, they are gone soon in our memories, too. “What was there?” we ask of a vacant lot. The vacant lot gives no clues. We need the photographer, the visual historian of complete accuracy.
I have a postcard of Louie’s, the inimitable hang-out for teens of the 1950s and 60s, which brings up a thousand memories each time I look at it. Even though its building remains, the Louie’s of my memory is so gone now that I have to think about it some to recall if it was immediately north of Ben Franklin or if the original Home State Bank was doing business between.
Now that the Greene Bean coffeehouse is serving us uptown coffee in its uptown location, I hope the Osbornes have taken plenty of photos of it. I hope they make them into postcards for their patrons. Did you know that their place was once a bookstore? A bank, a bike shop, the post office, a grocery store, a billiards emporium? They have pictures, mostly from newspapers, but not enough – many incarnations are lost to history because no one thought to capture them.
I hope photos are being done of the other new coffeehouse, Homestead, in the old Penney’s, the former Mary Ann’s . . . perhaps Bob Owens could tell me what was there before, in the 1930s. I have seen a photo taken of Old Hiway 30 looking west from the southeast corner of the courthouse. There is no date on it, but the vintage of cars is 1920s, the Lincoln Hotel is indeed a hotel, and forward in the photo is the building in question, an advertisement painted on its side.
We live in a town of “back to the future,” or as someone just said to me, “Mayberry,” a non-native husband’s perspective. However much it has remained the same, our town changes by the year. We could use a couple of constant historians in the form of perpetual photographers. Maybe it could be a minor job paid for by our taxes or subsidized by donations to the Historical Society, eventual repository of the endless Jefferson.
