I was working on my first project for Baltimore's Historic Charles Street Association in 2006 and I went online to round up and bookmark some source material. I ran across Groeninger's New Baltimore and downloaded a copy. It's in the public domain.
Furst Bros Company in Sharp-Leadenhall is a long-time client of mine and I was excited to find one of their ads in the little book. (A half-page ad, thank you very much.) I created a cover and burned the book to a few CDs as a little gift for them.
Jones & Groeninger was a photography and publishing house located at 404 N Paca in Baltimore. They were apparently hired by the City and a group of business-men to create a promotional marketing piece to show the world that Baltimore had been rebuilt after the Great Fire, was once again open-for-business, flourishing, bigger, better, and a grander center of commerce than ever before.
The photos, before-and-after the Great Fire of 1904, are wonderful. The photographer was Wm J Groeninger, a partner in the firm.This afternoon I didn't have time to find the reference CD that I'd made over 5-years ago. I went online and found that people are trying to sell this out-of-copyright book from anywhere between 99-cents and $14.96. Well, that just seems silly. I've paid for public domain material before, but only when value was added by way of research, citations, redirects, and the like.
You may download a PDF by clicking on the preview above or by clicking here to go directly to my page on ISSUU.
Jones & Groeninger published their own quarter-page ad in the book.
Jones & Groeninger - About This Book
For more information about the Great Fire of 1904, the Maryland Digital Cultural Heritage Program is the best place to start: The Maryland Digital Cultural Heritage Program is a collaborative, statewide digitization program headquartered at the Central Library, Enoch Pratt Free Library / State Library Resource Center in downtown Baltimore.
This is so cool, thank you!
Do you know if anyone has an original paper copy that can be seen in person, or who scanned it originally?
Posted by: TD | Saturday, August 20, 2011 at 12:25 PM
You're welcome. The Library of Congress has a copy and here are the scanning specs:
Scanningcenter: capitolhill
Mediatype: texts
Identifier-bib: 00013741062
Identifier: groeningersnewba00balt
Ppi: 300
Camera: Canon 5D
Operator: kirtina latimer
Scanner: scribe10.capitolhill.archive.org
Scandate: 20081007151132
Imagecount: 90
Identifier-access: http://www.archive.org/details/groeningersnewba00balt
Identifier-ark: ark:/13960/t3fx7hq64
Sponsordate: 20081031
Sponsor: Sloan Foundation
Posted by: Stephen Brockelman | Saturday, August 20, 2011 at 12:41 PM