Salmon Through the Lens of a Camera
| Each year there are fewer people alive to reminisce back to the days when the springtime economy of Newport was built on the backs of salmon, back in the days of the giant salmon runs. While it is sad to lose the people with these first hand memories, thanks to the dynamic photography team of Harry and Alice Richardson, the salmon runs will live on forever, at least in pictures. | |||||
| “Dad was a real history buff,” Norman Richardson said, remembering his father who died in 1960. Even when he took the pictures, he knew that he was preserving the region’s history. Norman Richardson, who died at his home in Florida early this year, said in a chat with this writer before his death that he was thrilled that his father’s name and memory are so well recorded in the state’s history. Yet, it saddened him that history has all but forgotten his mother, Alice. They were a team, Norman said, speaking proudly of his parents. Norman Richardson said that, whereas his father was a bit on the antisocial side, his mother, who died in the 1980s, was a social butterfly who loved people and walked up and down Newport’s Main Street chatting with people as she went. It wasn’t a rare sight to catch her playing pinball in one of the stores. |
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| Probably no other people preserved as much of Newport’s past through pictures, as well as the rest of Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom, than the Richardsons. Harry and Alice traveled the state taking thousands of pictures, not only of posed people, but of people going about day-to-day activities, and also of buildings. All the pictures, many made into postcards, are slices of history. Many of Harry and Alice Richardson’s pictures, and the history that they hold, are now preserved within the Richardson-Cartee Collection, much of which is housed at the Old Stone House Museum in Brownington. Some of the most recognized Richardson photos were taken of fishermen on the railroad bridge in Newport in the days of the big salmon runs of the1920s to 1940s. This was in the day when Newport was a bustling railroad community with several large hotels. Norman Richardson still remembers that although his father loved to take pictures of the fishermen and their catch, his mother loved to catch her own fish.
“She was a hell of a fisherman,” Norman Richardson said. “She could out-fish most of the men in town. She loved to fish.”
Norman Richardson joked that he figures the reason he doesn’t eat fish today is because he cleaned so many fish in his earlier days—most of them caught by his mother.
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