Main St., Unionville, Conn. 80.

Main St., Unionville, Conn. 80.

Pictured is a street corner in the center of a small town showing a large, three-story brick commercial building and row of older frame buildings beyond. In the center, a group of men in suit and hats gathers on the raised sidewalk. Several early autos are visible on the street. 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 sent back to Belfast, Maine, and processed into postcards at the printing plant on High Street. The scene shows an animated summer day on Main Street in downtown Unionville, a paper and machine parts mill town located along the Farmington River in central Connecticut. Here a group of well-dressed men stands outside A. Croby's Phamacy, and cars are driven or parked along the street. The buildings are a mix of an early 20th century large brick block with a parapet roof and its corner cut to face the intersection, and a row of older, wood frame commercial buildings from the mid-19th century. One of these has a storefront advertising an ice cream parlor.