This is the Joseph G Marcy Photographs 1900s-1920 Update.
Joseph Greason Marcy was a descendant of Ebenezer Marcy who settled, in the late 1700s, in the area later known as Marcy Township and Duryea.
Joseph Marcy took up photography in the early 1900s and began to print his photographs on postcards and WWW.DuryeaPA.Com recently acquired over 350 picture postcards from that collection.
The collection includes street scenes, collieries, houses on the opposite side of the river including Peek-a-Boo which was a patch settlement near the Babylon Colliery, photos of the inside and outside of the Marcy Home at 802 Main Street, street cars, and horses and buggies, Marcy family members, citizens of Duryea, and never before seen pictures of the Marcy Park area from the 1900s are also part of the grouping.
Marcy Park was an area that extended generally from the end of Marcy and Cooper Streets along the Lackawanna River up to the Old Forge line in Lackawanna County. It included a river walk or promenade that served as a scenic location for photographers to take pictures of the local gentry as they strolled along the banks of the tranquil Lackawanna River dressed in their finest Victorian outfits. The area later housed the Shukwit dance pavillion that held dances a few times a week in the 1920s and 30s, and the Black Diamond Fire Company had picnics and carnivals on the grounds in the 1930s and 40s, and many Duryea kids played baseball and football there in the 1940s and 50s. The promenade, the dance hall, the baseball and football fields, and lush greenery are long gone as a result of the numerous floods that ravaged Duryea over the years, namely the devastating flood of 1955.
Please note that the majority of these images are around 100 years old and the equipment that was used to photograph them was very crude. In some cases Mr. Marcy tried various times, etc. to try to get better results. For instance, sometimes he changed the amount of time he left the shutter open to capture a specific scene. Also, remember that printing techniques back then were not the best and some of these images have faded over the last century. But the most important thing to remember is that most of these images represent Duryea and some of the people who lived here and they are often "One of a Kind!" images that would have been lost to our community forever if we had not gained access to them. So please bear with us on the images that are not the clearest and enjoy the many that offer a unique view of Duryea that would otherwise never have been seen.
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