Local history: Help us ID these fragile images of Northeast Ohio

The glass plate negatives were a mystery. Who knew what images they might contain? They were so fragile that I didn’t want to touch them.

Lucille Hageman (1915-2009), former vocalist for the Denny Thompson Orchestra, gave the 4-by-5 plates to me nearly 25 years ago. As I recall, she said the negatives had been passed down to her late husband, Harold “Red” Hageman, a radio announcer at WADC, WCUE and WAKR.

She had planned to throw them away but thought maybe I could find a use for them. Well, it took awhile. Wrapped in old newspapers and glassine envelopes, they’ve sat in a cardboard box in our basement for years.

It recently occurred to me that I needed to get the black-and-white photographs printed before the images were lost forever.

I took the box to Ed Halamay, the owner of Halamay Color Lab on South Main Street in Akron, who had helped me on other projects involving local history. His parents, Walter and Pauline Halamay, started the business in their basement 65 years ago.

Glass plate negatives, which went out of fashion in the 1920s, were already obsolete when the company began and they are extremely rare to see these days. Customers show up with the delicate plates only once or twice a year, although the equipment to process them is long gone.

“There’s always a solution,” Halamay said. “When people bring me things like this, I go: ‘Hmmm. How are we going to handle this one?’ ”

I left the negatives for a week or so, and Halamay performed his photographic magic. In layman’s terms, he gingerly placed each negative on a light table and shot it with a high-end digital camera at high resolution. Then he took the digital file, brought it into Photoshop, cropped it and converted it to a positive image, controlling contrast and density, and adding sharpening.

“I was very happy with the results that we got here,” Halamay said.

He put the 26 images on a flash drive, and printed one out as an 8-by-10 photograph so I could see an example.

The picture shows an overall-clad worker carrying a load of crates on a horse-drawn wagon labeled the Ohio Injector Co., a Wadsworth company that manufactured locomotive injectors at the turn of the 20th century.

My jaw dropped. The details just popped: The man crossing his arms, the weary-looking horse, the spoked wheels, the rutted road, the loading dock.

For years, these dusty negatives had been trapped in a box in the basement, but now they were breaking free.

“As you can see by the 8-by-10, they produce extremely well,” Halamay said. “We could take it a step further by cleaning it up, but that would take away the historical value of it.”

I paid for my order, thanked Halamay, collected the old negatives and rushed to work with the flash drive. It felt like my birthday as I clicked through the 125-year-old pictures on my computer. Each was a little gift.

Young fellows in suspenders and bowties ate watermelon and sandwiches. A woman and toddler, wrapped in shawls, sat in rocking chairs on a porch. Stern-looking men relaxed outside a hardware store.

Whoever took the photos had an avid interest in railroads because there are several pictures of trains and stations. All appear to be local.

Some of the images were easy to identify such as the railroad depots in Tallmadge, Kent and Wadsworth. I also recognized the dance pavilion at Silver Lake Park and the summer resort’s steamboat from 1900.

But other pictures baffled me. What was the location of the general stores and businesses? Who owned the beautiful house with the gingerbread trim? Is the building with the bell tower a church, school or town hall?

Vintage photos: Unearthed images reveal Northeast Ohio around 1900

I’m hoping that readers might know.

Today we are reprinting some of the unidentified photographs. A gallery of the entire collection is available to view online at BeaconJournal.com.

If you can provide information about the images, please write to mprice@thebeaconjournal.com or Mark J. Price, Akron Beacon Journal, 388 S. Main St., Suite 720, Akron, OH 44309.

Let’s try to identify them.

This article originally appeared on Akron Beacon Journal: Local history: Help us ID these fragile images of Northeast Ohio