The Dryden Mutual Insurance Company Verne Morton Photo Gallery
All of these images were taken in and around the towns of Dryden and Groton.  Should you wish purchase prints,
please email community@thehistorycenter.net.  Please refer to the image number when ordering.
 

Verne Morton Lehigh Valley Express, White’s Line, 1898. N1.11. The Lehigh Valley Railroad came into existence in 1853. By the 1890s, “Leaky Valley” lines stretched from New York Harbor to Tifft Terminal in Buffalo, passing through Pennsylvania and the Finger Lakes region. Local residents made full use of passenger, mail, and freight services.		Verne Morton LeRoy Smith’s Residence and Team, 1901. N1.108. Verne Morton, like many photographers of his era, made many images of people, their animals, their dwellings, and outbuildings. The importance people attributed to personal place and the lives they’d built largely with their own ingenuity and labor endows such photographs with quiet pride and sober reflection. A farmer’s team of horses or oxen was so important that the animals almost inevitably appeared in the images.
Verne Morton Ike Smith & Charles Hotchkiss Gathering Sap, 1903. N1.187. Sap, once running and tapped, had to be collected at least daily or more often, depending upon weather conditions and other factors affecting the flow. Typically, buckets were dumped into larger containers and hauled to “sugar houses,” shelters that usually were roughly constructed near the sugar bush site.		Verne Morton Ike Smith Tending Fire, 1903. N1.188 A shelter was desirable when boiling sap, but not necessary. Outdoors fires worked well when the weather cooperated, and the tender didn’t have to inhale as much smoke.
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