5000+ fine-art prints suitable for framing. Desk-size to sofa-size and larger, on archival paper or canvas.
The Shorpy Gallery
Join and Share
Social Shorpy
To love him is to like him. Our goal: 100k "likes":
Recent comments
- Wonderful image of bygone times
- I love it!
- Laptop
- And a Happy
- The Real Mad Men
- Indeed
- Meanwhile, overhead --
- Roma Wine
- Foote, Cone & Belding
- Fenestration
- Armor!
- Sheaffer Pen
- Tinker toys and Mini-bricks
- Woolen facade
- Double hung
- Roma Wines
- Two phones!
- Curious
- E-cigarette
- License and Registration, please
- Iron Man
- Sleep with the fishes
- I wonder what happened
- Victor Home Recording Blank
- Escape device
- Training
- Ludovico technique
- Momsen lung
- Legacy of "Swede" Momsen
- Boy scout
Member Photos
Photos submitted by Shorpy members.
Colorized Photos
Colorized photos submitted by members.
About the Photos
Most of the photos on this site were extracted from reference images (high-resolution tiffs, 20 to 200 megabytes in size) from the Library of Congress research archive. (To query the database click here.) Many were digitized by LOC contractors using a Sinar studio back. They are adjusted by your webmaster for contrast and color in Photoshop before being downsized and turned into the jpegs you see here.
Image Galleries
Search Shorpy
Today's Top 5
City Galleries
Vintage photos of:
The Kodachrome Hills: 1942
Submitted by Dave on Thu, 11/15/2007 - 5:51pm.
May 1943. "Nearly exhausted sulfur vat from which railroad cars are loaded. Freeport Sulphur Company at Hoskins Mound, Texas." View full size. 4x5 Kodachrome transparency by John Vachon, Office of War Information.
Sulfur
Submitted by Anonymous Tipster on Sat, 11/17/2007 - 4:56pm.
When I was a small child in Galveston, there would be scores of gondola cars on the same train, full of sulfur. Likely mined somewhere like this.
[This is where they stored the sulfur after it was extracted. - Dave]
Re: Crane
Submitted by Brent on Fri, 11/16/2007 - 2:00pm.
"Interesting. A crane on the rails. Was it attached to a rail car of some sort?"
If you look at the full size version of the picture you can see that the crane is part of a rail car. It is turned sideways to handle the sulfur which is why the back end sticks out over the sides of the rail car.
Crane cars are hardly uncommon. Most railroads have a wreck train on call at division points in the event of serious derailments and those trains invariably include a crane. For an industry like this where they are using trains to move product out of the pit a steam crane mounted on a railroad car is just about ideal - mobile and doesn't require extra space to move in. These days of course most open pit mines don't use rails to move product out but truck that would make your basic monster truck look like a Hot Wheel.
THE 100-YEAR-OLD PHOTO BLOG
Shorpy.com | History in HD is a vintage photo blog featuring thousands of high-definition images from the 1850s to 1950s. The site is named after Shorpy Higginbotham, a teenage coal miner who lived 100 years ago.
RSS | Contact Us | Privacy Policy | Photo Use | © 2014 Shorpy Inc.
Today's Top 5