Lewis Reed Photo: Lady & Toddler on a 1913 Excelsior
Unknown lady and toddler posing on an Excelsior motorcycle. Photo by Lewis Reed
Back in the early part of the last century when the motorcycle was still new and a novelty, it was often used for Kodak moments.
Lewis Reed has a number of photographs showing relatives and other unknown people on their motorcycles in the period of the early 1900s through the early 1920s. This photo taken by Lewis Reed is an unknown lady and a toddler (mother/daughter?) posing on an Excelsior motorcycle. The motorcycle was easy to identify because of the logo, but I could not pinpoint the exact year it was made. I tend to think it might be a circa 1913-1914 model Excelsior.
This is, without question, one of the best posed photos on a motorcycle that I have come across in my grandfather’s albums. The toddler’s sporty little cap and goggles make the image. Just imagine how excited she must have been to sit on that big machine.
The motorcycle seems to be well equipped with extras including: a headlamp, a handlebar-mounted Klaxon horn, and a well padded passenger seat on the back.
Then & Now: Thomas Hardware Store, Gaithersburg
Looking at old photographs is like peering through an open window back into history. Not only do they give you a sense of wonder from traveling back in time, but also a staggering feeling of awe from seeing just how much things have changed. For this post, I have used one of Lewis Reed’s original photographs for “then” and a Google Maps street view image from today for “now”.
Thomas Hardware Store (THEN): This photo was taken by Lewis Reed when the first system of water mains and sewers were installed by the WSSC in Gaithersburg, circa 1926-1928. The store in the background is the Thomas Hardware Store, originally built and operated by Thomas Iraneous Fulks. The water pipes to be laid are resting by the side of the road. The child on the right in the photograph is Lewis Reed’s daughter, Mary Jane (Reed) Gartner.
T. I. Fulks was a businessman and farmer. He worked as a bookkeeper for the Gaithersburg Milling and Manufacturing Company and then opened a hardware store at 219 East Diamond Avenue.
Thomas Hardware Store, originally built and operated by Thomas I. Fulks. Photo by Lewis Reed, ca. 1928
Thomas Hardware Store Location (NOW): The same view 90 years later. The old hardware store is enclosed in the present brick building (Gaithersburg Rental Center) at 219 East Diamond Avenue.
219 East Diamond Avenue today
Source: Gaithersburg: History of a City
Photo Manipulation Without a Computer
If you take a look at the state of photography today, such as the advances of digital cameras and the artful image manipulation by Photoshop, it is easy to forget that back in the 1900s photographers couldn’t just go into a computer program and change their images any way they wanted. Instead of retouching an image on a computer, as it’s done now, it originally took place on the negative.
Photo manipulation was one tool Lewis Reed had in his photography tool belt. He was 100 years ahead of his time by creating special effects to images long before the convenience and efficiency of digital photography and Photoshop were ever imaginable.
I was hugely interested in how this was undertaken, and by the fact that the modification looked so seamless in the printed image. Spotting these manipulated photos in his extensive collection has been both easy and difficult. Some were simple double exposure images or hand colored images. The addition of these hand-drawn backgrounds was a little more difficult. It wasn’t until I viewed the high resolution scan that this modification jumped out at me.
Reading up on the subject I have become aware that retouching is in fact an art that evolved right alongside the birth of photography. The photographs below were retouched by hand (also known as “handwork”) on the glass negative using a hard graphite pencil and pieced together in the darkroom from separate photographs. The two photographs, one of the people standing on the edge of a cliff, and the other of the hand-drawn mountains, appear to be joined at the edge of the cliff where the mountains begin. All of this required a degree of artistic skill and access to a darkroom. Lewis Reed developed his own photographs in a darkroom in his house — in the kitchen, to be exact — and worked at night to develop the negatives.
The photographs below show two unknown people posing on a cliff in front of a hand-drawn background of mountains.
An original photograph retouched with hand-drawn mountains by Lewis Reed
Same photo as above, different angle, retouched by Lewis Reed.
Today, we can look back and appreciate the time and creativity it took to edit these photos without Photoshop.
Then & Now: Gaithersburg B&O Railroad Station
This post is a continuation of a series of “Then & Now” images that will show photographs of buildings, street scenes, and other historical locales from Lewis Reed’s Photo Collection alongside photographs of how they appear today.
Gaithersburg B&O Train Station (THEN): The station was originally built as the Gaithersburg B&O Railroad Station and Freight Shed in 1884, for the Metropolitan Branch of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad (B&O). A freight house, which currently houses the Gaithersburg Community Museum, allowed farmers to easily ship their products. Over the years, the station buildings gradually fell into disrepair and by the 1960’s were slated for demolition. According to the Gaithersburg city website, they were purchased by the city from the Chessie Systems in 1984 and restored. The Station and Freight House have been listed in the National Register of Historical Places since 1978.
Gaithersburg B&O Railroad Station (looking north up the tracks), 1911. Photo by Lewis Reed
Gaithersburg B&O Train Station (NOW): The same view 107 years later. The station has limited hours but still serves as a ticket office for MARC train daily commuters going to and from Washington, DC. Amtrak trains rumble through Gaithersburg but this is no longer a scheduled stop on their routes. As many as 50 freight trains travel through Gaithersburg each day.
Gaithersburg B&O Railroad Station today
Source: Maryland Historical Trust
MCPD Marks 96-Year Anniversary Today
This is the first known photograph of the entire MCPD. Pictured left to right: Earl Burdine, Lawrence Clagett, Guy Jones, Chief Charles Cooley, Leroy Rodgers, and Oscar Gaither. Photo taken by Lewis Reed on July 4, 1922.
Today marks the 242nd anniversary of the birth of our nation and the 96th anniversary of the beginning of the Montgomery County Police Department. Cattle rustling, bootlegging and stealing poultry were among the most common crimes when Montgomery County hired its first police chief and five officers in July 1922. So widespread was the theft of chickens and turkeys that some residents employed a homespun form of crime prevention by cutting off a specific claw on their birds to identify them. “Officers knew who all the chicken thieves were,” said one historical account of the era put together by the police department, “and upon getting a report of missing Rhode Island Reds, or some other breed, would head straight for the thieves’ hideaway to try to catch them ‘red handed’ before the birds got to the frying pan.”
Posing in front of Reed Brothers Dodge on July 4, 1922 Chief Charles Cooley, center, and his men of the first mounted unit of the Montgomery County Police Force, were on their first day of duty. For several years, since there was no police station, the officers would meet for “roll call” on the steps of the Red Brick Courthouse in Rockville at 2:00 p.m. every day to let each other know they were alive and well. Chief Cooley was given the privilege of a Model T Ford. The chief was paid $1,800 a year (the chief now gets $112,564) while the officers got $1,500. Each of the officers was issued a Harley-Davidson motorcycle, a .38 Smith & Wesson handgun, a black jack, law book and was allotted $300.00 a year for the upkeep of their motorcycle. Jones patrolled Silver Spring, Rodgers the Bethesda-Chevy Chase area and Burdine, Clagett and Gaither the Upper County areas.
The county’s population in the early 1920s was just 35,000 (it’s now more than 800,000). Much of the county was farmland, which accounted for the thefts of livestock. It also was the Prohibition era, when bootlegging and moonshine still factored routinely on an officer’s shift.
The officers worked 14 hours at night, 10 hours in the day, with two days off every two weeks. But they were on call at all times. Since there was no mobile radio contact (the first one-way radio system was installed in cars in the early 1930s), the officers tended to hang around the courthouse or a local firehouse that had a phone.
One of the officers came up with the idea of placing a flashing red beacon light on a pole atop the Rockville courthouse. When flashing, it would alert police that they had a call or were wanted at the office. In 1927, similar lights were used at district stations in Silver Spring and Bethesda.
Congratulations MCPD and thank you for your many years of service!
Source: County police department celebrates 75th anniversary July 2, 1997
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Reed Brothers Dodge History (1915-2012) by Jeanne Gartner is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.
Reed Brothers Dodge History 1915 – 2012 
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