From collection Eastern Illustrating & Publishing Company Collection
Convent et Ecole Ste. Anne, Bristol, Conn. 123.
Image of a large brick institutional building on a flat site facing a street. A young girl stands looking at the photographer from the sidewalk in front, providing a startling sense of scale. 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. This sober-looking brick block, with its restrained Renaissance Revival bays and parapets, was apparently the convent school associated with St. Anne's Roman Catholic church during the first decades of the 20th century. Like many such schools in more urban areas in the Northeast, it was established to provide a parochial education to the children of a growing Catholic population in an otherwise Protestant city where public schools were the only alternative and anti-Catholic bias existed.
