Evansville

From our contemporary vantage point, we should take the time to look back to how people in American communities lived at the beginning of the 20th century.The focus of this work is Evansville - in the early 1900s, the only emerging metropolis between Louisville and St. Louis, and then the radial center of a hinterland stretching in all directions for at least 100 miles. Evansville illustrates how the city landscape changed because of the early industrial era, how people made a living and related to each other, and how they spent their leisure time. About one-fifth of the images in this collection focus on the residents of the Evansville region: the Tri-State of southwestern Indiana, western Kentucky, and southern Illinois, which has been Evansville's service area since the 1850s.

Many of the photographs featured are from the Special Collections Department of Rice Library at the University of Southern Indiana and were made during the period from 1898 to 1905. Of the remaining photographs, none predates 1889 or is newer than 1911. So we have a clearly defined slice of time-the end of the Victorian age and the beginning of the twentieth century-in a distinctive place in America, the only large city (and its hinterland) on the lower Ohio.