Methodist Church, Baltic, Conn.

Methodist Church, Baltic, Conn.

Summer time scene in a village of a picket-fence and tree-lined street, with a church on one side and houses on the other. This image is part of a series made by one of the three Eastern Illustrating & Publishing Company photographers assigned to cover New England or upstate New York. The quest for images that would be saleable as postcards resulted in the documentation of small towns and small town life at the turn of the 20th century. As the photos were shot, the glass plates were promptly sent back to Belfast, Maine, and processed into postcards at the printing plant on High Street. The white picket fence leads the viewer's eye diagonally into the scene, dividing the left upper half of the image for the Methodist Church, and the lower right to the street and the neighborhood. Mature trees shade the scene. Two automobiles are parked along the curbs near a Texaco gas sign. A war memorial, whose graphic suggests it commemorates WWI, would have been a recent addition to the church yard at the time the image was shot. The frame church, with its wood clapboard and shingle exterior and modest bell tower, is typical of many small-town Protestant churches of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.