Friday, December 15, 2006

Then and Now

A month or so ago Ken, our archeologist, spoke at a St. Thomas Historical Society meeting and met Jane Sheen who was interested in helping the park in its efforts to gather historic documentation on park resources. A few weeks ago, Ken and Susanna took a trip over to St. Thomas to meet Jane Sheen, and look at her collection of historic postcards of the Virgin Islands. The postcards date from the late 1800 hundreds to the early 1900 hundreds and many of the images captured park resources still in use, like the photograph above with the Reef Bay Factory still in operation. Others capture the people and the times like learning to make baskets at the turn of the century. The postcards are great and Jane was so helpful. That day she loaned 100 + cards right then in order for us to scan the images. This week, Susanna spent a few hours scanning in the images, front and back, because the back of the card can indicate when it was published. Eventually, we hope to process all the images and make them available online. Below one of the cards, shows the Creque Marine Slipway in full operation.


This is an image of the structure as it stands today. Thank you Jane for making this wonderful contribution.



1 comment:

Unknown said...

There's a picture of a ruin at Lameshur and a brief blurb about volunteering to clean ruins in this month's Sierra Club magazine.