Rockville 1912: Vinson’s Drug Store
1912 – Vinson’s Drug Store, Rockville, Maryland. Photo by Lewis Reed
This 1912 photograph taken by Lewis Reed depicts Vinson’s Drug Store in downtown Rockville. This post is a part of the blog feature called, “Rockville’s Past Through the Lens of Lewis Reed”. Lewis Reed was a well-known photographer in the county and many of his early photographs are now part of the Montgomery County Historical Society photo archives. I wanted to share this photograph, because it offers a visual history of a part of Rockville’s past taken more than 100 years ago.
Previous to Edgar Reed’s enlistment in World War I, he had been employed as a clerk by R.W. Vinson Drug Store for eight years. In 1919, Edgar became a partner with his brother, Lewis Reed, in the firm Reed Brothers Dodge.
The drugstore was built in the 1880s and was run by Robert William “Doc” Vinson from 1900 until his death in 1958. A document on the Rockville website says the drugstore was also a popular gathering place for city politicians, and that President Woodrow Wilson once personally traveled there to buy Wolfhound tablets. The building was torn down in 1962, and replaced with an office building during Rockville’s “urban renewal”.
Source: County Seat to Satellite City of the Nations’ Capital: 1931
Photoshop 1900s Style
A double exposure image of Lewis Reed’s brother, Edgar, seated on both sides of a table. Think about doing this without Photoshop. Photo by Lewis Reed
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. They did what they could with the tools they had. Double image exposure was one tool Lewis Reed had in his photography tool belt. He was doing crazy things to images like this one over 100 years ago.
With double exposure technique, you could create certain effects like placing the same person on both sides of a picture simultaneously. Very hard to believe this image was not created using Photoshop, it is just too cool. No digital manipulation here.
Lewis & Edgar Reed’s One-Room Schoolhouse
Circa 1898 class photo taken at Lewis and Edgar Reed’s one-room schoolhouse (Darnestown School). There were six grades in the school with one teacher. Minnie McAtee, teacher (right rear).
One of the most amazing photographs in my grandfather’s collection is of the one-room schoolhouse where he and his brother, Edgar, went to school. The photo was labeled “Darnestown School”. I cannot say with any certainty where this school was located, but my mother (Lewis Reed’s daughter) thought it was located on Thomas Kelley’s Farm on Route 28 in Darnestown.
In most rural (country) and small town schools, all of the students met in a single room. There, a single teacher taught academic basics to several grade levels of elementary-age boys and girls. The classroom of a one-room schoolhouse probably looked much like your own. The teacher’s desk may have been on a raised platform at the front of the room, however, and there would have been a wood-burning stove since there was no other source of heat. The bathroom would have been outside in an outhouse. It seems a far cry from the modern school world of today, but it was the reality of the rural education system.
Darnestown School. Note the outhouse on left. Photo by Lewis Reed
Source: Germantown MD Wikipedia
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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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