Photo Record
Images
Metadata
Object |
Negative, Glass Plate |
Photographer |
Nichols, Lester |
Year Range from |
1899 |
Year Range to |
1910 |
Location |
Vermont, Bennington, East Main Street |
Description |
Glass plate negative of downtown Bennington at the corner of East Main Street and School Street. E.L. Nichols' store in center hung with bunting and Americn flags. Many people onthe street. |
Information |
The building in the center of this photograph, on the south side of east Main Street, was built in 1877 for Edwin Levi Nichols' department store, which specialized in clothes, fabrics, and ornamental goods. The building was originally a two-story wood framed structure in a vernacular interpretation of the Second Empire style. The third story, designed in a sympathetic style with two distinctive bay windows, was added in 1896. Lester Nichols took up photography as a teenager, capturing this image of his father's shop, where he went on to work for much of his adult life, in the late 1890s. This photograph was likely taken during one of the town's annual Bennington Battle Day celebrations, when stores in the downtown business district were often festooned with patriotic bunting and flags. The building stands today largely as it did in the late nineteenth-century, with the exception of a façade of Rochester green marble on the street level, which was added in the 1949. |
Related People |
Nichols, Lester Hutchinson |
Credit line |
Gift of Lloyd Oppenheimer |
Catalog Number |
1984.203.24 |