Description
Before interstate highways. Before motels on every exit. Before GPS, air conditioning, roadside assistance or even the reasonable expectation that the road ahead would actually be a decent road.
In the summer of 1925, Emil M. and Anna E. Gollnick climbed into their Dodge Brothers sedan in Vero Beach, Florida, and went for a drive.
More than 5,000 miles.
This extraordinary homemade album documents their automobile journey from Florida to South Dakota and back again between July 14 and September 5, 1925. Across approximately 45 leaves, the Gollnicks combined 108 original photographs with roughly 55 pages of handwritten narrative, creating something far better than an ordinary family photograph album: an illustrated, day-by-day account of what American road travel looked like a century ago.
Their route took them north from Florida through Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Missouri and Iowa to South Dakota, with the return journey passing through Wisconsin, Minnesota, Illinois, Georgia and elsewhere. Family provided some of the destinations—the couple spent their longest stop in Springfield, Missouri, and visited a sister’s farm in Milbank, South Dakota—but getting there was very much the story.
And the roads were not always cooperative.
One entry describes a detour beyond Madison and muddy roads filled with stranded automobiles: “Pulled one car out of the ditch and another one run into the ditch on the other side before we got away.” The Gollnicks themselves eventually required help getting out. Another entry records 289 miles in a single day, an impressive haul in 1925. Tourist camps became their regular accommodations, and the diary frequently notes the day’s mileage, road conditions, meals, weather and stops along the way.
The photographs turn an already terrific manuscript into a genuine visual record of America between the wars. There are automobiles everywhere, of course, but also farms, families, livestock, campsites, towns, trucks and roadside scenes. Particularly wonderful are photographs of Redman’s Ice Cream, including wonderfully lettered early delivery trucks posed outside the company building. Other images show tractors and farm machinery, cattle crossing open ground, the Gollnicks’ automobile and the people encountered or visited during the trip.
There is an important distinction between an old photograph album and something like this. Most albums tell us very little beyond what we can infer from the pictures. Here, the photographs have remained attached to the narrative that explains the journey. We know when the travelers left, where they went, how far they drove, where they slept, whom they visited and what happened along the road.
It is simultaneously a photograph album, manuscript diary, early motoring document and piece of American social history.
A century after Emil and Anna Gollnick pointed their Dodge north from Florida, their entire road trip is still here.
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