The Poultney Historical Society owns and cares for thousands of historical photographs. The collection was thought to contain mostly print photographs and postcards, both extensive in subject and scope.
But in the spring of 2004, a collection of about 887 glass plate negatives was rediscovered in several boxes in the Melodeon Factory. While these negatives had been known about for decades, they had never been systematically archived.
The current technology of scanning allowed, for the first time, a thorough look at these negatives in a way that was affordable yet yielded remarkably high quality images. The result is photographs that are strikingly varied and compelling.