Get by with a little help from my friends. Truly we could not do without the help of friends here at W7thCo. So many of you have first hand knowledge of the people and places in our photos and have been a great help in identification. Few can compare with Ashley Brown. Our friend Ashley has been a regular visitor for quite some time now and he has identified countless people in our photos. This is key to accurately documenting and cataloguing a collection as vast as the Orman Collection.
One person identified in a photo often leads to an exact date, place and others in the image. So, it is no small contribution when someone helps us unlock the story behind the photo. Ashley has done this time and time again. Those of you that know Mr. Brown are aware of his keen memory and his long experience as a lifelong citizen of Columbia. That’s just how we ended up being corrected on an image in our Summer 2019 show.
Mr. Orman must have spelled names phonetically because there are times when the name on the envelope containing images is not quite right. However, it’s the only thing we have to go on and we have to trust that W.A. Orman got the name right. In the case of Mr. Burrough, W.A. sent us in the wrong direction and we printed a display card that was about the wrong person entirely (oops!). However, at the opening for the show Ashely Brown immediately recognized the man in the photo, but not the name or description.
Turns out that Mr. Burrough is actually Mr. Burrow. We had searched for a J.M. Burrough in Columbia and came up with a traveling salesman that lived nearby, but Ashley told us that the photo we had on display was Joseph M. Burrow, a farmer in Riverside, and had been like a grandfather to Ashley when he was growing up in that neighborhood. We have corrected the display card and learned much more about Mr. Burrow since.
As you can see on this post, it’s a great photo and now it has a story to go with it all thanks to Ashley Brown. Come and see Mr. Burrow and the rest of the Portraits of the Past on display until Fall at W7thCo Gallery. You might even get to see our friend Ashley during one of his weekly visits. You might even be lucky to hear a story or two about growing up in Columbia.
