Building Florida’s Sunbelt Economy: 202 Photographs and Negatives of Automobiles, Air Conditioning, Construction Trades, Real Estate, and Business During the Postwar Population Boom, 1951–1952

George Fulmer Sunbelt Migration

Photograph

Large photo archive documenting the businesses, utilities, and construction trades within Pinellas County, Florida, during the region’s extraordinary population expansion in the 1950s. Clearwater Historical Society's notable photographer George Fulmer’s assignments record the businesses within this economic moment as it rapidly aimed to accommodate the postwar migration to the Sunbelt, adding hundreds of thousands of new residents to Clearwater's local economy. Fulmer documents automobile dealerships and service stations, air conditioning and electrical businesses, plumbers and roofers, real estate offices, building suppliers, appliance retailers, finance companies, concrete operations, health facilities, and waterfront development. The photographs establish what that demographic transformation required, showing the buildings, machinery, automobiles, consumer goods, employees, and service industries that converted population growth into an expanding metropolitan economy.

Photo archive of 202 items comprising 99 silver gelatin photographs and 103 corresponding large format negatives contained in 37 numbered commercial job envelopes often with captions, Pinellas County, Florida, principally 1952. Photographs and negatives vary in size from approximately 2.5 x 4.5 inches to 4 x 5 inches. Fulmer photographed businesses throughout Clearwater and the surrounding county, frequently making several views for a single client and retaining the negatives in numbered envelopes bearing handwritten names, addresses, assignments, and occasional dates. The subjects include Boulevard Auto Company, its nighttime used car lot illuminated by strings of electric bulbs and lined with late model automobiles beneath the painted declaration “New & used cars”; Peck Plumbing Company, with employees posed across a fleet of service trucks; McGee Electric, where workers stand beneath the company’s large “Electrical contractor” sign; Dean Roofing & Sheet Metal Company, photographed with its trucks and employees; General Ready Mixed Concrete, with concrete mixers assembled around its plant; and a Clearwater car wash advertising cars “Washed waxed and polished.” Other assignments record Gates gasoline selling fuel at 26 cents and advertising “Ask about free gas”; Shannon Realty and W. S. Shannon’s storefront real estate listings; a Gulf Life Insurance building occupied by an architect, insurance agents, and an automobile upholstery business; a county health center; the Clearwater marina during construction; an A. M. Kidder & Co. brokerage office with a wall sized Dow Jones quotation board; and a well drilling operation with workers beside heavy equipment. Consumer commerce receives particularly detailed treatment. Fulmer photographed a General Electric window display crowded with electric fans and air circulators under advertisements for “Summer comfort,” as well as the opening of a Clearwater appliance store where Philco air conditioners, refrigerators, ranges, washing machines, radios, clocks, and small appliances fill the showroom. Other assignments extend into roadside and leisure commerce, including the Pelican Restaurant, a Mexican jacket retailer, a family loan company, golf outings, and business employees posed with company vehicles and equipment. The repeated relationship between job number, client name, negative, and finished print preserves evidence of Fulmer’s commercial photographic practice as well as the businesses he was hired to document.

Florida’s postwar expansion formed part of the broader redistribution of American population toward the Sunbelt, and the state’s wartime military development helped initiate an economic and demographic boom that accelerated during the 1950s. Florida Memory notes that military personnel who had trained or served in the state returned after the war as visitors and residents, while the Census Bureau identified migration as a central component of the nationwide population redistribution of the decade. Pinellas County provides an especially concentrated example, as its population gain during the 1950s exceeded its entire population at the beginning of the decade. Fulmer photographed the practical implications of a city doubling its population, showing how these new residents engaged in the real estate market, increasing roads and automobiles, gasoline and automobile maintenance, electrical and plumbing contractors, concrete and roofing companies, consumer credit, refrigerators and washing machines, and, in Florida’s climate, an expanding market for mechanical cooling. Light surface wear and occasional handling marks to prints and negatives; few negatives show excessive degradation and are in poor condition; envelopes with expected toning, edge wear, creasing, and occasional tears. Overall in good to very good condition. This archive documents the economic machinery behind Sunbelt growth: The contractors, concrete company, plumbing, electrical work, air conditioning, automobiles, gasoline, real estate, finance, appliances, health facilities, and marina construction collectively answer: It shows what did it actually take to build a rapidly growing Florida metropolitan area.

Item #23865

Price: $1,250.00