Steam Logging, Oil Extraction, and the Rise of California Automobile Tourism: Photo Album of 116 Silver Gelatin Photographs, 1930s

California Logging Automobile Travel

Photograph

California photo Album documenting 1930's roadside commerce's, Oil and logging industries, and desert sightseeing across Southern California and Death Valley, circa 1930s. Include logging photographs made when steam power still ran the woods, before the gasoline tractor and chainsaw displaced the steam donkey engine and the logging railroad. The photographs were made just as the paved highway and the auto court were turning the California desert and mountains into a tourist destination reachable by family car. John Marshall High School in Los Angeles, shown new and unweathered in the album, opened its doors on January 26, 1931, fixing the album's date to that year or shortly after.
Photo Album of 116 silver gelatin photographs, mostly snapshot format, ranging approx 3 x 5 to 5 x 7 inches, California, Sierra Nevada, and Death Valley, circa 1931 to 1935. The logging images show a tracked crawler tractor fitted with a tall steel arch for skidding logs, a steam donkey engine venting steam beside a yarding spar rigged with cables, decked logs stacked on railcars marked with painted numbers, a single rail line running through uncut timber, and a man in suspenders and field hat standing beside a standing tree with a felling axe and undercut wedge driven into the trunk. The Southern California group includes wooden oil derricks stepped up a steep eroded canyon wall, three women in cloche hats and drop-waist dresses standing arm in arm on a pile of oil-field casing pipe, a touring sedan with passengers parked among the derricks, a typed caption reading "No 4. Artist's Drive. Death Valley" above eroded badland hills, the neon-topped "El Don Motel" sign advertising kitchenettes and refrigeration, the "Beechwood Motor Apartments" and "Aut-O-Tel" auto court, a palm-lined commercial street with a Citizens Bank and parked Model A automobiles, the Collegiate Gothic John Marshall High School captioned in pencil, the grounds of the Hotel del Coronado, covered wagons drawn up in a mountain meadow, a backyard scene of an older couple outside a board cabin, and harbor views with a small fishing boat numbered "A 619." Photographs are mounted with black corner tabs on black album leaves, several captioned in pencil or by typed slip.
Southern California in the early 1930s was the most prolific oil-producing region in the world, with derricks crowding canyons and city lots from Signal Hill to the Newhall fields, and the album captures ordinary visitors treating an active oil field as a sightseeing stop. The same years saw the auto court and motel emerge along the new highways, and the El Don and Aut-O-Tel signs document that roadside lodging industry in its first decade. The logging photographs record steam-era timber work, the crawler tractor and steam donkey caught at the moment mechanized gasoline equipment was about to replace them. Overall in very good condition, with some fading to individual prints. The album places steam-era timber work and first-decade California auto travel side by side, recorded firsthand during the years of the development of roadside infrastructure.

Item #23424

Price: $1,250.00