Keeping with our fire department theme that I started with last week’s post, here is a photo of Westville’s John B. Capewell in a firefighter’s uniform.
I can’t detect the string that Capewell cleverly used to release the shutter in some of his self portraits so somebody else must have been behind the lens to snap this picture of John in his fire brigade finery.
Along with this photograph of Fireman Capewell, I’ve decided to throw in this shot of some fire fighting apparatus.
My guess is that this was the Independent Fire Department’s latest acquisition and they were mighty proud and excited about it. The piece was probably set up in Capewell’s yard for the picture.
Below is the entire glass negative of the apparatus. This will be of interest to our viewers from Westville not so much for the fire fighting equipment but for the houses that used to line Broadway a the time. Some of the architectural details like the gingerbread are fantastic!
They don’t build them like that any more!
Above is a blow-up of the girl next door who was patient enough to remain still resulting in a fairly decent exposure. Capewell used an emulsion and iris setting that usually resulted in blurred or ghost images unless the subject remained perfectly still.
As with all of the photographs in the Capewell Collection Glass Negative Collection, I placed these 5″ x 7″ glass negatives on a lightbox and shot them with a digital camera locked down on a tripod. The “processing” was done digitally on a Mac using Adobe Photoshop.
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The photo of the hand cart was taken on West Olive Street, Westville, NJ on what is today 218 W. Olive Street. The house in the photo still stands today located at 224 W. Olive. The other homes in the background are 254 W. Olive, 270 W. Olive (burned down in September 1995) and 300 W. Olive. The Independent Fire Co. No. 2 was located in the 200 Block of Chestnut Street from 1907 to 1922, moving to Broadway and Olive St until 1987 when the two Fire Companies merged. Today, the Westville Fire Department operates out of that Building.
Thanks, Chief! I was hoping that somebody from the fire department would chime in, and there you are!
Stay tuned! I have another fire department photo coming up!