Can anyone identify this town/city?

It looks like that painted advertisement on the building on the left says "Durant ___ry Co.". Of course, that doesn't necessarily mean that this is Durant.

That building on the right is pretty significant. Does the Oklahoma Historical Society say what it is, and does it have any other pictures of it?

xzmattzx said:

It looks like that painted advertisement on the building on the left says "Durant ___ry Co.". Of course, that doesn't necessarily mean that this is Durant.

That building on the right is pretty significant. Does the Oklahoma Historical Society say what it is, and does it have any other pictures of it?

Click to expand...

OHS doesn't say, and there are no other pictures of it that I'm aware of. I wish I could make out what appears to be text under the third floor, middle pair of arched windows.

Maybe that's why the OHS thought this was Durant because it does kind of look it says "Durant" on the advertisement. My first impression of the text below it was "___ky Co." One big clue that eliminates this to be Durant is that Durant never had streetcars, and the city in this picture appears to be much bigger than what Durant was in 1900 (pop. 3,000) or 1910 (pop. 5,300).

Let's see. Apart from Durant, OK, the other Durants are in Florida, Iowa, and Mississippi. Also, we can nail down the period as being prior to the automobile, or at least prior to its popular production. Looks like we can probably eliminate all the cities named Durant, however, as they were all (and have remained) fairly tiny places and particularly pre-automobile, certainly not enough to be able to support a streetcar system.

I guess your best bet is to find out what kind of company is on that sign you're focusing on. I tried "Dairy" and came up with nothing. I thought maybe it had something to do with Durant Motors, Inc. out of Michigan, but this clearly predates that. Though there was a Durant-Dort Carriage Company prior to that. Both Lansing and Flint were about 16,000 in 1900 and 30,000+ in 1910 and both long had streetcars, but this doesn't appear to be either city.

I have no idea. lol

KayneMo said:

The Oklahoma Historical Society labels this picture as Durant, Oklahoma (my hometown) but it's been determined by me and others that this isn't Durant. I've been studying this picture and I'm almost positive that it's not even in Oklahoma at all. Does anyone recognize this street and buildings?

Click to expand...

Found it.



You're correct to think this photo was not taken in Oklahoma. Nor was it made in Arkansas, but...

In Tennessee. And in Virginia. Depends on what side of the street in the photo you are on. (Left is TN, right is VA)

The street in the photo is State Street, Bristol VA/TN (link to the exact point of where the picture was taken.)


Source: JF Ptak Science Books

A lot has changed since the old photo was taken: almost every building has disappeared, except for the buildings in the far distance. The picture was taken standing near the trainstation (still there, behind the photographer), looking west, towards downtown Bristol.




There is a lot of (Country music) history connected to this particular place apparantly, however I know nothing about it, and have no interest in the genre. This site says that the building third on the left was home to the first studio where Country music was recorded. Well, that may be. But the second image on that site brought me to the sollution to your puzzle: the Hotel Tip Top.

The Hotel Tip Top was mentioned in the (quite faulty) description of your original photo, so I started to search for a "historic Hotel Tip Top". (The vague letters on the hotel on the right suddenly made sense.) Then I found the Country music site mentioned above, et voila.

The letters on the left (which some clumsy historian thought were "Durant") probably say "Restaurant ...ky Co." or: "Draft Wisky Co." We may never know that for sure though, because other pictures I could find of the same spot show a hattery (Taylor Christian Co.) in that building.

À propos, here are some other old pictures to prove that this is indeed the same spot, even though it is hardly recognizable today:


Earliest picture I could find, around the age (late 19th century) of your picture. The streetcar and the electricity/telephone poles are still there. Your picture is certainly a better quality and probably a bit older, because of the carriages. (Maybe the first photograph ever taken in Bristol?)

Source: www.bristol-tenn-va-bottles.com


A little bit later in time, around 1900. The streetcar and poles are still there, but the automobile has entered the picture, as did street lamps.
A busy day in Bristol, but not for the Tip Top Hotel, as the sign seems to have disappeared. (edit: After posting this, I found out that the name later was changed to Hotel Colonial, so that's why the Tip Top sign disappeared.)

Source: believeinbristol.org


Now we arrive in the late twenties, a Gas and Electric Company has been built on the left, the street car and the horse dung have disappeared, a traffic light has been introduced, as have fancy Roaring Twenties street lamps (still there to this day!), asphalt and road markings.
The first two blocks on the left are completely gone nowadays, as has the first complete block on the right. Just left of the traffic light you can vageluely see the sign of the Paramount Theatre, which is still there.

Source: Pinterest user zerosuperstar


This looks more like the 40's or late 30's. The hotel is still there, it was probably demolished later in the 50's or 60's, maybe due to the widening of M.L.K. Junior Blvd, which runs in front of the station.

Source: Pinterest

So the puzzle is solved. I leave it up to you to mail the Oklahoma Historical Society, so they can delete this picture from their archive. And maybe mail Bristol that a very early photo of their main street has surfaced. As I already said, maybe one of the earliest photographs of their city. [edit: I've already mailed the Bristol Historical Society, including a link to this page.]

That was a fun puzzle! And I've learned a lot today, for instance, that there is a city on the Tennessee-Virginia border that is called Bristol.

Greetings from The Netherlands! (Never been in the USA, I should soon. I'll leave the Country music to other people, though.)

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

[edit: fun fact: I just found out that the first house in Bristol, built by Joseph Rhea Anderson in 1853, stood on the left side of the picture. (Across the street from the Hotel Tip Top, next to the site of Taylor Christian's hat cooperation, I put "café" there in my little Paint-map.) So this is not only probably Bristols oldest photograph, it is also (kind of) picturing the oldest place in Bristol. (Source)
There is even a marker to commemorate that fact.

The marker on the right, one can also see the spot the original picture was taken, right behind the fancy Roaring Twenties street lamp, in what is now the middle of a junction. To the extreme left is the trainstation.

Source: Mapio

[edit 2: I've e-mailed the Historical Society in Bristol. I'm very curious to know if they had this picture in their archives, but labeled properly.]

^^ Thanks Matt and Hudson!

I've also received a very nice and enthousiastic answer to my e-mail from the Bristol Historical Association; they will try and get the photograph from Oklahoma and take it where it belongs: in Bristol Va/Tn.
(And I am invited for a lunch and museum visit in Bristol, but I'm afraid my schedule doesn't agree with that invitation, unfortunately. Really nice people there in Bristol, though! I guess they really were unaware of the existence of this picture.)

Well, thanks to KayneMo for recognizing this photograph isn't what it's supposed to be, and setting me up unto this little detective job!

I'm now in the middle of composing an e-mail back to Bristol. I hope they can find out more about the picture (the date, the photographer, etc.) The description says "1906", but I'm not convinced of that. It says "Durant" and "Murial Wright" also, and that info has nothing to do with the picture either, plus it looks much older. We'll see.

^^
Thanks!
Yeah, me too, I think it has something to do with what you said earlier: the "urant"-part on the sign at the left side. (Which I think is the last part of Restaurant.) That could easily trick someone into thinking this could be in Durant.

Anyway, the historical society of Bristol is now going to try and get the original of the picture back to Bristol. As stated earlier, I've had e-mail contact with them, and they were also quite happy with this find.

KayneMo, thanks for starting me on this interesting search! After long and in vain attempts to try and read some of the words on the signs, finally the puzzle is solved. Who knew that not the words in the picture, but above the picture would hold the clue. Well, that was more a lucky strike than an intelligent guess, to be honest.

Sorry about trying to rob the archives in your city of a lovely photograph though

^^ Thank you!

About the urban "renewal": I originally posted that these buildings might have disappeared in the 50/60's, but it turns out it was in the 1970's that this part of State Street was demolished. As far as I can find out, the downtown businesses were in decline at that time, and the answer back then far too often was to just tear things down, and start all over. Unfortunately that ment replacing the impressive hotel and other buildings with generic offices and parking lots.

If you take a look at the current map of Bristol, you find that the old train station is a bit seperated from the downtown area; before 1970 the station was very closely connected to the shops, cafes and hotels. You had to just exit the station, and you stood in the middle of Front Street, then one of the main streets, now a parking lot. Nowadays the (much too) wide M.L.K. Junior Boulevard divides the station from the town itself. My guess is that not many people use the trainstation to see the sights in Bristol, but that most come by car, park on the spot where the Tip Top Hotel used to be, and wander into State Street.



So I guess that King Automobile is to blaim. The wide boulevard, the seperated trainstation, the big parking lots where shops and hotels used to be...
It is the same thing that happened with the freeways in Boston, Detroit, Minneapolis, Cincinatti, etc, etc, yet on a much smaller scale.

The Bristol Historical Association, founded in 1979, was created to bring these developments to a halt, so I read on their website. One wonders what would have remained of downtown Bristol, were it not for them.

Buffaboy said:

That's insane.

Click to expand...

Indeed.

Update: after 8 months, the original picture that started off this thread has found its way into the archives of the Bristol Historical Association.

So it's finally back home! Isn't that great?


The original photo, taken by a member of the Bristol Historical Association after its return to Bristol.

^^ Congratulations on all your hard work figuring out the location of the photograph - and for completing the job by helping to see that the photo got moved from Oklahoma City, OK to Bristol, VA / TN! And especially - extra bonus points for getting it all figured out from the Netherlands! Great stuff!