LOUISIANA, Mo. — John Wood has added a second contribution to the Louisiana Area Historical Museum.

Wood recently donated 700 colorized postcards, black-and-white photographs and film from Louisiana’s past. Now, he’s added 200 color slides dating from 1952 to 1960 and 75 older images imprinted on glass.

“I want these to be preserved,” Wood said. “A generation or two down the road, they may want to look at them and say ‘My, Lord, things aren’t like that now.”

“We can’t thank John enough for these pictorial gems,” said Museum President Brent Engel. “The slides preserve a wide variety of scenes from Louisiana and the area.”

Included are images of people, businesses, school, churches, the library, neighborhoods, flooding, bridges and boats. There’s even a Christmas tree.

The glass negatives are four inches wide and three inches tall. They were made by the Kansas City Slide Co. One appears to show President Teddy Roosevelt getting off the train in Louisiana just before he spoke to a crowd of more than 7,000 people on April 29, 1903.

The color slides measure two-inches-by-two-inches and provide a glimpse at such long-gone landmarks as the toll booth on the first Champ Clark Bridge in 1952. Places that can be viewed today include a 1953 picture of the Stark Cabin at the west edge of town.

There’s a shot of Lock and Dam 24 at Clarksville taken from the same vantage point in the winter and summer of 1952. Other towns highlighted in the collection are Eolia, Troy, Hannibal, New London and Atlas, Ill.

The unidentified photographer loved flowers, too, because there are multiple shots of roses, lilacs, flowering crabs and other varieties. A scene from March 1960 shows plowed snow piled up at the riverfront.
Engel said the museum will catalog items from both sets of donations and eventually put together a display or permanent exhibit.