Main Street, White, South Dakota

If there's a place in the mid-west the epitomizes "out in the middle of nowhere", it's the lovely town of White, South Dakota. Stuck over on the eastern-most side of the state, White (today) covers 0.99 square miles with a few houses, several churches, an ag coop and a bustling population of 491 people. It was founded in 1884, and named after W. H. White, the area's first settler.

Our photo is a real-photo postcard (AZO 4-triangles-up, a code on the back meaning that the paper was produced sometime between 1904 and 1918), and someone took the time to note that the it was taken on Hallowe'en. The view is looking east along unpaved Main Street, and not a single automobile is in sight, everything is still horse-drawn.

The oddest part, though, is the large harvester parked on the street.

And hiding in the shadows is an old horse-drawn rake.

Here's a Google Maps view of White....just not much there!

The Desert Depression Shooting Club

When the whole country's in a Great Depression, there's nothing like a little desert shooting expedition in New Mexico to help one escape from the troubles of life.

Our House - 13

This month's "Our House" photo is another very faded albumen print from the 1880s or 1890s, and depicts an elderly couple (the husband is wearing styles from the 1870s) posing in front of their home. Note the gingerbread decorative touches at different places on the house...someone clearly put a lot of labor into this place.

Parsonage in the Snow

This winter street scene in what appears to be a western town (sparse pine trees and rocks in the distance suggest a scene typical of New Mexico or Idaho) is accompanied by a puzzling pencil inscription: "Parsonage first, Bullis in distance." Presumably, then the nearby house is some church's parsonage, and the house farther away belongs to a family with the surname Bullis.

Mining Phosphate

Today we have two completely independent photos that appear to show the same thing, mining phosphate to be processed into fertilizer. The first image is a thin snap-shot, without any indication as to where it was taken. It shows a crew of laborers digging and loading their shovel-fulls into small rail cars. At first, I thought that it might be peat that they were digging, but then after acquiring the second photograph, I realized that it instead might be phosphate.

Shortly after acquiring the above photograph, I found the stereoview to the right, titled Mining Phosphate near Columbia, Tenn. This card is one of a series published in 1927 that dealt with mining and industrial development of Tennessee and the South in general. Most of the text on the back of the card is a general discussion of the importance of fertilizer to agriculture, but the last paragraph describes the process:

Phosphates are formed about decayed organic bodies in layers of rocks. In Tennessee the phosphate deposit is in limestone. Beds of this mineral are found in many places in the South, especially in Florida, South Carolina, Kentucky and Tennessee. Here you see how phosphate is dug out and loaded on cars. these cars are run to a nearby factory, where the mined material is manufactured into fertilizer.

Building an Overpass

There's a tremendous amount of activity and detail in this photograph from the 1920s. Construction crews are using a steam crane and a cement mixer to mix and pour concrete for an overpass. As of this writing, I have not been able to identify the location, but there is reason to suspect it might be in or near Scranton, Pennsylvania (more on that below). The photograph itself is in poor condition, and is starting to deteriorate, having suffered water damage at one point.

A team of horses stand waiting as the crew operates a cement mixer.

The only reference that I could find to Globe Stores was to a rather famous one in Scranton, PA; however the railroad station does not appear to be a Pennsylvania one.