Trip through Tribune files reveals mysterious stagecoach photo. When, where was it taken?
It’s time to put on your detective hat.
Take a hard look at this stagecoach photo and ask: Where in San Luis Obispo County is this?
What is the story that goes with the image?
I was searching through the few really old prints in The Tribune files, looking for pre-automobile age photos.
The newspaper has a small photo of the last stagecoach to cross the Cuesta Grade at the Ramona Hotel in San Luis Obispo on May 5, 1894, the day the Southern Pacific Railroad’s arrival in town made such coaches obsolete.
Then I came across a really great photo of a six-horse team hitched to a stagecoach in front of a post office.
It was found with folders of images that were printed in the Centurama edition of the Telegram-Tribune, published in 1956.
Centurama celebrated the 100-year-anniversary of San Luis Obispo’s incorporation. It was filled with early images of the county.
In the aforementioned stagecoach photo, at least 11 people pose on the boardwalk in hats, while seven more sit atop the coach with another man hanging onto the side.
Back then, photo emulsions were not sensitive. It took long exposures to record images, which is why most images from that era are static.
There was no newspaper clipping or typewritten caption attached to the shot.
On the cardboard back was written in pencil “History — Pioneer.”
In red ink it said:
“T.C. Hosford
No return”
The photo wasn’t printed in the Centurama Edition.
So when was it taken?
If you examine the image with the aid of a magnifier, you can see a chalkboard on the post office wall that reads Oct. 16, 1897. It advertises a party with ice cream and cake scheduled for the reading room.
The high boardwalk and the hillside behind it indicate that pedestrians needed to be above the street during bad weather.
But the post office does not look like any one I have seen in local images.
And there appears to be snow under the high boardwalk.
Snow. In October.
Uh-oh, this might not be a photo taken in San Luis Obispo County.
The name M. M. Getchell on the building is fairly unique.
Initially, I searched “McGetchell” (since part of the name was obscured by a utility pole) and actually turned up an image match.
Meserve M. Getchell ran a store, post office and hotel in a mining boomtown in the mountains southwest of Boise — Silver City, Idaho.
Born in Baring, Maine, in 1868, Getchell arrived in Silver City during the summer of 1889. By then, mining and stock raising drove the economy of Owyhee County; Silver City was a thriving community.
Today, the Idaho town is a ghost of what it was.
Apparently the building that once housed the post office and store is still standing, and was recently reinforced to stand up to heavy snow.
So why is a historical photo of that structure in the Tribune’s files?
The photo was too good to toss out, but no one wrote down the memories to go with it.
Now, thanks to the internet, we have the backstory and a clipping to go with the image.
