An Illustrated History of Tamaqua

Gifford H. Albright and R Thomas Berner are pleased to announce the publication of An Illustrated History of Tamaqua. The 120-page book contains photos and short historical essays about the photos. Albright is a native Tamaquan and Berner grew up there. Albright graduated from Tamaqua High in 1948 and Berner in 1961.

The following comes from the book:

From the Authors

This endeavor has enabled us to reminisce and we hope it will do the same for you. As we were compiling this, we remembered places we had played as children, train rides we had taken to faraway cities, politicians who had come to town on trains to campaign, schools we had attended that no longer exist.

We have benefitted from the work of others and while we list our sources at the end, we happily acknowledge the work of Paul Scherer, whose Musings of a Chronicler were compiled on a CD—with old photographs—by Bob Betz. A third person whose work made our job easy was David Bensinger, who compiled old postcards of Tamaqua, some of which appear here.

We especially salute Bob Betz for taking the time to look at our final manuscript. And we thank Micah Gursky for providing a copy of an old map that we tweaked in Photoshop to create the cover.

We note a certain irony in this compilation. We never set foot in Tamaqua to do any research, but were able to find our sources either online or, in the case of the Scherer collection, on a CD purchased many years ago by one of us. We communicated via e-mail.

We need to emphasize that we are not historians and have not sought out primary sources to confirm what we learned from secondary sources. We also want to emphasize that this in no way is a definitive history. If we did not have a particular image, we did not write an essay. We debated how far afield to go in each essay and decided that for the most part, each essay would focus on the image and that we would seldom update to provide current information. Sometimes we used an image to represent something larger. The Tamaqua Unions allowed us to mention modern championship seasons.

In our selection of photos, we aimed to be representative. We had three times as many photos as we used but wanted to keep the book to a reasonable length and price. In order to hold down the price, the authors are forgoing royalties.

Tamaqua Then and Now

This book is a collection of photographs/postcards—then and now—of the town of Tamaqua, Pennsylvania, where I grew up. I graduated from Tamaqua Area Joint Senior High School in 1961, worked for two years at the Evening Courier, a newspaper that no longer exists, then joined the U.S. Navy. Thanks to the G.I. Bill, I was able to go to Penn State and I never really returned to Tamaqua except for visits to family.

So this book is a long overdue return visit. I collected old photographs and postcards of Tamaqua from many sources and then walked around town on two days in July 2009 taking new photographs of old sites. I did not use anything other than my eyes to attempt to match the new with the old. For the most part, I shot with a 10:20 lens because I believed that only a wide-angle lens would recapture the past. The camera actually captured much more than the originals, so I then cropped to more or less match.

This book is a work in progress and a labor of love. Although there is some history attached to some of the photographs, for the most part it’s the comparative scenes that I was most interested in. After all, I’m not a historian and I don’t have the resources to track down the history of each building. But I do have a camera.

I wasn’t able to photograph every site to match every postcard or photograph that I have. I just plain forgot to shoot the Majestic Hotel, and a truck that was parked in front of Odd Fellows’ Cemetery for days on end made me skip that scene. Heavy foliage kept me from shooting some scenes from the road to New England Valley and lack of time or foul weather kept me from getting some other photographs.

Given that some day I hope to go back and also my hope that other old photographs and postcards will surface, I’d like to think of this book as a first edition or first in a series. I love Tamaqua—it really was an important part of my life—and I’d like to help contribute to remembering it in my way.

I’d like to suggest that someone organize a major one-year photoshoot in Tamaqua to record what the town is like now so a century hence residents will have photos for comparison. When I think of all of the buildings that have disappeared in my lifetime (including the Courier!), I realize how important it is to document the town now for the day when it will be the town then.

R Thomas Berner