In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

{1} The Light of the Texas Panhandle A hundred years ago a huge wave of settlement and prosperity poured into the Texas Panhandle. It reflected an age of global migration wherein settlers moved onto the Pampas, the Veldt, the Canterbury Plain, and even the once-forbidding High Plains of Texas. More than a hundred thousand optimists moved into the twentyfour -county region of the Texas Panhandle after 1906. These buoyant newcomers transformed the region’s economy, culture, society, and politics. They gave the Panhandle an impressive agrarian economy and a bourgeois character. They also ended its lonesome, poor-boy, frontier ways. Economically the newcomers financed the conversion of old, worn, corporate ranches into modern, fertile, individual farmsteads, all served by a central place hierarchy of railroad towns and outlying hamlets. The wilderness receded as the Garden of Eden image dominated environmental perception. The Old Panhandle, one of the state’s last frontiers, became the New Panhandle, a rising business empire that was the fastest-growing region of Texas from 1900 to 1910. At the same time—attracted by the stirring opportunities—dozens of talented photographers joined the migrations and work flows pouring into the Panhandle. With exquisite timing these commercial visionaries set to work photographing the land booms, the new cultural landscapes, the charismatic cowboys, and above all the dawning age of machines in town and country. This book celebrates the 1900s to 1920s, the golden age of the Texas Panhandle, by presenting the lost visual arts and the forgotten photographic artists of the age. The period was so complex and so remarkable that words alone cannot do justice to the era. I was in a new century myself, wanting to tell the story in a way that would appeal to the visual learners of the early 2000s. And indeed the narrative needed pictures, hundreds of them, to chronicle the end of the last frontier. Perhaps the story of “the big change” could be done through the medium of photography itself. If pistoleers and cowmen had defined the vocational romance—and much of the history—of the Old Panhandle, perhaps promoters and photographers could define the romance of the New Panhandle. It had always seemed to me that historians were obsessed with the supposedly romantic cow culture of the Old High Plains. I knew from my own family history that it was farmers, grangers, hoe-men, “pumpkin rollers,” tenants, and field hands who really tamed the land. The 1900s–1920s era was an intensely photographic experience for the Panhandle. Thousands of Kodak cameras appeared, and every boomtown of consequence had a resident “town photographer.” For more than a decade I have studied and collected the golden age photography of the Panhandle. In the process I found one medium with significant photohistorical potential—the otherwise humble real photo postcard, or RPPC to aficionados, also known as the silver gelatin postcard print. This same era witnessed a tremendous enthusiasm for postcards. Common to the United States as a whole, newcomers to the Panhandle mailed tens of thousands of scenic postcards to distant friends and relatives. And they collected those cards mailed to them, often buying bulky albums to store and display them. The finest and most interesting of these scenic images from a scenic age were actual photographs printed from negatives on special photographic paper, sized and cut and sold as “real photo” postcards. What attracted my attention was that the most interesting visualizations of the New Panhandle typically appeared as 3½" x 5" real photo postcards. They were sold for a nickel, stamped for a penny, and mailed off to scattered friends or folks “back home.” The photography was so distinctive that one can learn to recognize the work of individual photographers. Most of their names had been lost to history. Their surviving photo cards had been scattered by the postal winds of North America. But when the cards were methodically regathered from their USPS diaspora and organized geographically, an impressive visual heritage began to shine forth. It was the light of the real photo postcard, the Light of the Texas Panhandle. The Light of the Texas Panhandle {2} I began to collect the lost photographers of Texas, scouring the Internet, visiting antique stores, and attending postcard shows, all in search of the rarest and finest imagery that had survived for a century. Thankfully the postcard mania that gripped the nation from 1906 to the 1920s left a significant photohistorical legacy, one now appreciated by museums, universities, libraries, and avid collectors...

Share