Index of Cumberland County Birth, Wedding, Divorce & Obituary Newspaper Records - 2003
This index runs from January 1, 2003 through December 31, 2003.
Book Review: Clyde A. Laughlin: Postcard King of the Cumberland Valley
Walter Lewis Cressler, Jr., Clyde A. Laughlin: "Postcard King of the Cumberland Valley" (self-published, 2000) viii, 45 pp. appendix, illustrated. Paperback $16.95.
This little book is a gem. For historians and the collectors of early twentieth century postcards, it is a valuable resource. Written by Laughlin's grandson, it contains a chronicle of Clyde Laughlin's life and a comprehensive 86-page list of the postcards that he produced over the course of his 44-year career as a photographer in south central Pennsylvania.
Laughlin, a native of Newburg, Pennsylvania, was a prolific photographer, creating well over 3,000 negatives on glass and film. That is a huge amount of work considering that he photographed with a cumbersome, tripod-mounted 4x5" view camera. Although this was the standard technology of its time, it was anything but a "point and shoot" camera. Each photograph it produced came from an individually developed negative, the result of a labor intensive and time-consuming process. I was most impressed to read that during a two-week period in 1909 Laughlin produced and sold over 35,000 copies of postcards from 29 separate negatives shot of Carlisle's Old Home Week, an astounding 2,500 copies a day.
He began his career in early 1902, working for C. G. Miller in Shippensburg, and by July of that year, Laughlin had purchased the studio from him. Over the next four years he was in and out of the photography business until he was able to re-establish his own studio in 1906.
With a boom in postcard sales prompted by new postal regulations, Clyde and his wife, Agnes, ran a postcard store in Shippensburg, separate from his studio, from 1906 until its closing in 1908, shortly after the birth of their second daughter. After Agnes' departure, Clyde couldn't justify the increased overhead incurred by hiring an employee from outside the family and he closed the shop. He contained to combine his card work with his commercial business and produced cards until 1916, when his interest in postcards waned as their popularity decreased. Although he continued to make cards throughout the rest of his life, the 1907 to 1915 period was his most productive.
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