Each New Year’s Eve we experience both memories and anticipation. Just over 100 years ago in 1922, a traveler from Idaho memorialized both in this scrapbook of a family road trip found at a QBO sale. Assembled from souvenir postcards, cut-up tourist brochures and maps, and photos they took themselves, this memento was created in the sweet spot just after WWI and before the Great Depression. The personal photos are black & white because the first color film stock, Kodachrome, wasn’t invented until 1935. The ‘color’ photo postcards included were hand-tinted black & whites first, with color-separated printing plates created for production.
Although 100 years seems long ago, scrapbooking is older, an unintended side effect of the printing press’s arrival around 1440. Prior, books were made by hand and only for the wealthy. Once writing and illustration could be mass-produced, there was an explosion of ‘ephemera’ – flyers, posters, pamphlets and cheap books. Regular people started compiling letters, poems, recipes, quotes and prints into albums called ‘Commonplace books’. Friendship albums came next in the 16th century. Like today’s yearbooks or wedding guest books, friendship albums collected well-wishes from friends and family. Next came souvenirs of vacations, with cheap colored prints of festivals and landmarks sold specifically for tourists to glue into their albums. In the 1700s scrapbooks became diaries or blogs, holding report cards, party invites, concert ticket stubs, pressed flowers, even locks of a beloved’s hair. The hobby was called extra-illustrating or grangerizing. Albums made exclusively for showing off photographs arrived in the late 1800s as the public started enthusiastically snapping away with newly invented cameras.
Our scrapbook is made of commercial photo album pages bound with shoelaces, no cover. Refill pages were sold to expand albums as needed, so the ‘author’ improvised. The photos were likely shot with a Kodak Brownie, just on the market in 1920. It’s still possible to read the fading text, and typing it up must have been no small task. Each stiff page had to be individually fed into a typewriter and typed before gluing the photos down. In some places there are faint pencil marks delineating where pictures are to go. There are dropped words and slight misspellings but we’ll overlook those – this was a labor of love. The family spent six months planning this trip to visit their grandpa and grandma “long to be remembered by us“.
The title reads “Colombia River Highway 1922; Interesting Treasures of the Most Wonderful Highway in the United States.” (Aww…) Inside: “Until this roadway was built, the Colombia River Gorge had never been passable, except on board of railroad train”. The highway had just been finished but was not entirely paved, some stretches were still gravel. Their route took them from Nez Perce, Idaho, “leaving at 5:30 AM on August 6, 1922 in good weather.” To save money they camped the entire way. To Portland Oregon and from there to Seaside, returning by way of Prosser Washington. Along the way they took special interest in how nice the homes were in towns they passed through and how beautiful both wilderness and farmlands were.
Charmingly, the trip’s beginning is meticulously documented with mileage, departure and arrival times and the names of strangers this kind family rendered roadside assistance to, but the last pages are mostly just stuffed with postcards as the author gave themselves over to the experience and stopped taking notes. Apparently they enjoyed Oregon so much that they (or their descendants) later moved here, bringing their lovely album. Happy New Year from QBO!
Tuesday Treasures was started by our staff member, Jeanne Lusignan. Each week she will be featuring items that have been found at our estate sales. If you would like to submit a treasure for Jeanne to feature in a future installment of “Tuesday’s Treasures”, please follow the button below and send us an email! Please attach a few photos of your treasure in a beautiful setting as well as any details you have about your item such as manufacturer, use, age, region of origin. If you don’t know about the piece, that’s okay! We still might be able to research it for you! Don’t forget to tell us what makes this item such a treasure to you!