Could be anywhere, but it’s East Chestnut St.
East Chestnut Street, looking east from Lincoln Street toward North Avenue, circa 1905
East Chestnut Street as it appears today
A quiet residential neighborhood with a wide brick street – it could have been anywhere.
A few of our readers suggested the scene reminded them of East Maiden Street in Washington. Others guessed the photo was taken on the city’s Locust Avenue, or on Highland Avenue in West Alexander. A few Greene County readers thought the scene might be Pine Street in Jefferson or East Lincoln Street in Waynesburg. But they were all mistaken.
R. Lloyd and Kathleen Mitchell were surprised when they saw the photo in Monday’s newspaper because they immediately recognized in the foreground the house in which they lived for four years when they first came to Washington after Lloyd was hired to teach philosophy at Washington & Jefferson College.
“We moved into the house at 408 East Chestnut Street in the spring of 1965,” Kathleen said. The entrance room had a great staircase and sitting bench, she recalled, and all the walls were painted by hand to appear to be old oak panels.
The house, for many years the home of William B. Cameron, was torn down when Church of the Covenant expanded its building and added a parking lot off Chestnut. Several of the houses in the old photo are still standing, including the one visible on the left, which is now the home of Thomas and Deborah Mainwaring.
The Mitchells identified the steps at far right as those leading to the home of dentist Howard R. Smith.
Nancy Weiss, another East Chestnut Street resident, wrote us, “the lay of the land is just like East Chestnut Street coming from the intersection with Lincoln toward the end of East Chestnut at Wade. I walked that block yesterday, newspaper in hand …”
Her suspicions were correct, and the proof is definitive: The same photo was published in Volume 8 of “Artwork of Washington County,” published by Gravure Illustration Co. in 1905. We suspected the print in the Observer-Reporter’s archive was perhaps a photo of a postcard but was, in fact, a photo of that published picture. Oddly enough, the Mitchells own a copy of the book in which the photo appeared.
Chestnut Street is now paved. “Roughly 20 years ago, during the street’s reconstruction, the cobblestone and bricks, which had been covered with pavement, were pulled up,” Kathleen said. The yellow bricks that once stretched all the way up Chestnut can still be seen on Penn and Sherman streets, which intersect with Chestnut between Lincoln and North Avenue.
The house on the right beyond the lot entrance in the recent photo was known to the Mitchells as the Cramblett house. It does not appear in the old photo because at that time it was located on Beau Street. It was moved to its present spot to make way for the Church of the Covenant. Look for another Mystery Photo in next Monday’s Observer-Reporter.