years how did you begin collecting old photos of jacqueline underhill i guess i've always kind of been interested in history and my family had a certain amount of pictures  t was an old the pad the house i grew up in was built probably with as near as we can tell about eight hundred twenty five and there was a picture of that taken around one thousand nine hundred or so that was just in the family and hundred twenty s my grandmother had a kodak brownie and always took a lot of pictures around so we had a bunch of family pictures and so on and then as time went on it just ceased you know somebody else would have an interesting woman that you know taken with my camera take a picture of their picture really have to hunt for them and find them in unexpected places yes the answer is kind of both they on the one hand the historical society in jerko now has a pretty good collection of pictures and the underhill historical society which is a little less active these days still has a good collection in the regard of one time there was a photographer that lived in riverside but how durable having three villages corners durable center and riverside and gentleman lived in riverside was an amateur photographer and from a probably at least the one nine hundred thirty s up through the sixty's took thousands of pictures which the underhill historical society now has is negative collection but the other thing that's very interesting is when you think you finally seen all the old pictures there are all of a sudden some other picture shows up that you never knew existed so they keep popping out of the woodwork unexpectedly from you never know  where there is a an online collection of photographs that is done through the university of vermont and i've certainly got some of the pictures in fact of one that i know in particular used in the show that came from their archives the state historical society has a lot of old pictures online there was at least two that i used in the show that came from their archives that until it was pointed out to me by another collector that they were on line i did never knew even knew existed so th just barely turned up certainly that i have just copied a picture today of a local house here from folks that just had it in their collection and they come from a everywhere and anywhere and you never know where when i've got one had a card supreme relatively so far away from them and you never know now you studied history a college i was a history major in college and had nothing to do with my profession i ended up having a summer job at i b m and ended up working there for thirty nine years having absolutely nothing to do with history but just always kind of been interested in history along the way and so i'm recently retired so now have a little more time to do some of these things which parts of town has changed the least or which you know how has it really had struck to how they really look exactly like they once did well let me first kind of answer the opposite side of that there's a few areas that have changed drastically and a lot of that was due to fires there's been an amazing amount of fires in the between jericho and under help and so those sections of town where there was you know older churches business blocks houses what have you that have been lost or where i think you see the most change so really in a lot of cases if there wasn't some disaster like that that struck the  the houses in a lot of cases are still even the older houses are still pretty much you know look like they did if there was a house or couple houses or a public building or two in jericho in underhill that commonly is known as the day have most and jericho corners originally was built by henry field about in the mid east hundred seventy s and certainly there after was bought by the build a and his family was owned by them for many years and they're still kind of carried on their name and that is an italian eight style house don't really know much of anything about the history of it as far as who designed it or anything but just looking at the place it had to have been designed by an architect it wasn't just something that some country builder put together and it is an exquisite example of the talian a house and all of the minor detail that it is is just astounding and had been owned for about fifty years by a gentleman named matt to groot who was a contractor down i think in new jersey and only stayed here a couple weeks in the summer otherwise the houses just closed up but he managed to preserve it very well during that time and eventually as as years went on he passed on and the house has been sold and then the folks that own it now terry her and mary beth perelli have done a wonderful job or stor and several of the bedrooms had marble sinks in them which they have restored operation and it's it's a it's just a remarkable house another one that comes to mind is the homestead of the original settlers and jericho the brown family they originally settled in jericho and seven hundred seventy four and in a lot of cabin a whole interesting story behind them they were captured by the indians and taken to montreal as prisoners and so on but there's it's not clear either their son or possibly their grandson built a house not near where the original log cabin been located and the descendants of the family lived in that house until one nine hundred seventy so it had been in the family for something like one hundred fifty years and the it was then sold to another gentleman used for a little while for a doctor's office and his son and heir his daughter and son in law now live in the house and have done a modest amount of restoration but the house was was pretty original start with it didn't it didn't really need to that there's some question but we think the house was probably built about eight hundred twenty four and was a typical farmstead of that time period with a long attached wood shed behind the what's known as an english style barn on with three smaller environs where there are some town photographers that really stand out from the old days a few people that somewhere maybe that's a little too broad a range but somewhere in that area there was a man that lived down in riverside here called named earl cross and he was an amateur photographer he by trade was a mechanic ran a service station and took thousands of pictures over the years semi professionally i think in some case i believe in doing my research for this talk i did find reference to where he had some kind of a photographic studio or something but it was really a sideline for him and he had a couple of interests in particular one was the burlington alone while railroad which ran almost the site of his garage and also he was very interested in covered bridges so a lot of the pictures he took were of those subjects but a lot of other pictures around town in an older time period back in the or eight hundred sixty s the eight hundred eighty s time period one of the common photographic formats you found at that time were stereo views that would fit in a little handheld viewer and had two pictures taken side by side and the cameras that they were taken with had two lenses just as you have two eyes so that the pictures were slightly different so when viewed through the viewer you saw the picture in three d and there are a couple of photo photographers that did stereo views one was a man named richardson from st alban's the parent lee had a wagon the he toured through the area with periodic lee and some of the pictures probably were taken on request but others i suspect were just taken as general photographs and then he would try to sell them to whoever he couldn't in fact as one picture i know i've seen i don't know who the photographer was in that one but you can see in the picture his wagon which apparently as soon as he took the picture he had a darkroom in the wagon and processed the pictures right there and i'm other man was a half styles from burlington who also toured around the area and took photographs i say some of these di no date back into the eight hundred sixty s and probably went pretty much out of fashion by the eighteen late eighty's early ninety's which are your favorite business blocks and i think some of the pictures of those buildings before they burned a very interesting one that comes to mind is the pierce block in jerko which was a two story kind of an italian eight style  in eight hundred eighty one with a towel in it brackets along the roof and so on and it just across the road from that was the bernie hotel which was built about eighteen zero seventeen i think something like that and burned in one thousand nine hundred four and there's a couple of pictures of that and just to look back at these pictures today and imagine what the village would have looked like had these if these buildings still existed today's just you know makes you reminisce wish that they were still there and what were some of the things that really stand out for you about life here one hundred years ago or more one of the things that certainly comes to mind maybe  wasn't exactly brought out by the photos but more turned up and doing the research about the photos is kind of get the impression now adays that back in that era people just kind of lived on their little farms and you know maybe they traveled a couple miles up the road to the store and that was about the extent that that was what their life was like but when you really start doing the research especially by the late eighteenth hundreds when the railroads had come through how much people traveled there was a family in that lived in jericho that had come moved here from germany and there's records of where they had traveled to germany to visit some of their family some of their family in germany had traveled to jerko to visit here and another thing that was eight hundred ninety three at the world's fair in chicago how many people from jerk own underhill went to the world's fair in chicago i mean dozens on the other hand you know some of what i just said was true that people did tend to stay put in the regard that commerce was largely local there was not only just grocery stores in town but there was clothing stores in the course of blacksmith shops and the ten smith and hardware stores and most anything that you know you would require in day to day living because you know today it's no big deal at all hop in your car and drive to burlington shopping but back in those days it certainly was an all day trip with a horse and buggy you might even have stayed overnight and once the train came through town still i mean you could go in in the morning and back at night but it was an all day trip and one of the things  commented the presentational in the photos there are about twenty kids or so in one of the photographs that you show that picture you speak of was the church street schoolhouse back in that era of course they were instead of a town school they were all manner of local one room schoolhouses probably fourteen to sixteen or more in each town the idea behind that originally being that schools were close enough to people's houses so they could conveniently walk to them probably there's kind of a couple of transitions the first one probably brought on around the time and perhaps somewhat by the civil war of course early in vermont and jericho is certainly part of that and sheep phased out so did the wall and mills and kramer started popping up and eight hundred seventy seven the railroad came through town and so that enable people to there were either farmers that were records where they were shipped off as far as south america the second big change i would say probably came about maybe and in the one nine hundred fifty s and early sixty's as pretty much farming started to disappear in town certainly there's a few farms left even today but nothing like it was fifty or sixty years ago and most people by that point are starting to get jobs in burlington if that's the big operation that showed up about that time was i b m came in one thousand fifty seven and all of a sudden jerko and underhill are changing for farming communities to bedroom communities and most people that live here you know started working elsewhere out of town her before up until that time everybody pretty much had been employed right very locally right in town as in a lot of the country even anything that's left in town for businesses that businesses today is pretty that's service industries as opposed to the manufacturing that had gone on here back in the late hundreds when there was a lot of mills on the different rivers and so on and so forth what are some of the challenges or what's your method to recreate those past photos it must be pretty difficult to get exactly the right angle and well in a lot of cases it's not too bad the i guess the most challenging thing has been the i'm not sure if this is the correct term but the magnification because of the using a different camera and compared to what kind of a lens they get might have had on the cameras that they took these older pictures with either that the picture today to get the right zoom or the right the same coverage that they took in the original picture it's not it's not so much trying to stand in the same spot but they get the same view when you are standing in the same spot and how do you notice that the natural surroundings have changed so many times you go to take a modern picture of a very interesting old picture and you can't take the picture because white had been open hillside or open valley is now all grown up to trees it's not maybe that the trees are bigger there are trees where the never were trees and when i say never were i think this probably heralds back to the time of the sheep farming when vermont was largely deforested and certainly even within my lifetime looking from from where our house is located up on the south hill you could say that where the tree line is has advanced down the hill further and further as the years have gone on during eighth generation vermonter if not more can you say a few words about some of your own family photos one that comes to mind is a a picture of the house that i grew up in this i mentioned earlier was built about eight hundred twenty five as best we can tell and this is a picture taken in the eighteen nineties with my grandfather's in laws standing in front of the house and just to see how how the house looked you know years ago that was the most interesting and there's another a couple of other pictures of other before my grandparents lived in that house they had lived in the house across the road doing all this research obviously takes a lot of time and a lot of effort and what is it that drives me to keep researching keep digging and keep finding these old photos in the stories behind them oh a lot of it to me i mean i'm you know i'm just interested in history to start with but a lot of it is kind of the you find some little question that you know you're trying to find the answer to it is kind of like looking up a mystery one thing right now that we're very curious about one of the buildings that i used in the current show that i just did was of the knights of pythias hall in underhill which had an iron fire escape coming down the side of the building it as a guy almost to the ground it turned a corner and came by last couple of steps around the front of the building the modern pictures the fire escape is going in the opposite direction and no longer comes around the corner it goes the other way why was it changed and so you have digging into jay that here some will curiosity and you know trying to find the answer to it and so many other things that are along the same way there that and sometimes you're looking for one thing and happen to just stumble onto the answer to some other question you've been wondering about so you never know what's going to turn up