Amesbury History – Discoveries in the Background
Page from Mike Harrold’s "Envisioning Carriage Hill Development" showing buildings visible in the background of a railroad depot photo and their connection to features on an insurance map from the same period. (Click to enlarge.)
Photographs and other illustrations that document the area of today’s Chestnut, Oakland and Morrill Streets made before the great fire of 1888 are very hard to find. For some researchers this lack of information can discourage their efforts.
But Amesbury Carriage Museum volunteer Mike Harrold, didn’t let this challenge derail his quest to discover the history of Carriage Hill. It drove Mike to look at other, less traditional sources.
It turns out that photos and postcards made for other purposes, such as displaying a new railroad station or advertising a local company, offer glimpses of the area from an earlier period. Mike came up with the idea of examining the backgrounds of these images, and then comparing them with a collection of dated drawings and insurance maps. Using these different sources, Mike was able to establish a chronology of the changes in the landscape. Mike then skillfully presents these discoveries in his recent report, “Envisioning Carriage Hill Development Prior to the Fire of April 5, 1888.”
One report page, for example, shows how an 1882 or 1883 photo of the Amesbury railroad station includes surprising details of other important structures in the background. These structures include Huntington’s Arc (a large carriage showroom on Carriage Hill) and the N. H. Folger factory with its elevated walkways for moving carriages between floors. These features had not been seen before!
The Amesbury community is indebted to Mike for his long-time commitment to discover these hidden bits of information and develop a visual history of the pre-fire Carriage Hill district (and other Amesbury places). Without this dedication to detail and his organized approach to connecting the photos, drawings and historical data this story of the pre-fire era might have been lost. Thank you Mike! for your creative energy and passion for local history.