From collection Eastern Illustrating & Publishing Company Collection
St. Joseph's Parochial School, Bristol, Conn. 98.
Image showing the front of a two-story Italianate brick building with a campanile on the roof. 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. Here the Eastern photographer takes in the (1903) elementary school established to provide the growing Catholic population of Bristol with a parochial education and alternative to the existing public school programs. St Joseph's was the first such school in the city, graduating its first 8th grade class in 1908.
