Marietta is blessed with a well-documented past. For more than a century, photographers have carefully recorded daily life in the area. My favorite photographer of Marietta’s past is Harry Phillip Fischer. He was born in Marietta and opened a studio in 1901. For the next four decades he shot thousands of photos of Marietta. Working with bulky glass plates and film he shot photos of the people and scenes around Marietta.

Thankfully, his collection ended up finding the ideal home: the climate-controlled, bunker-like special collections department of Marietta College’s Legacy Library. His photos are one of several photographic collections housed at the school. The college has digitized nearly nine thousand of the images, available to anyone with a computer to view from the comfort of their own home. A lot of the photos were taken on nitrate film and the unstable material is very flammable. Digitizing the photos was the only way to save them for future study and made them available for anyone with internet access to look at every single one of them.

The newspaper has published a total of nine books over the last several years and I’m thrilled to have worked on all of them. The Fischer collection has been an important part of producing them and I have looked at most of the photos in the online collection. You too can do a search for “Fischer Collection at Marietta College.” Get comfortable, there are 892 pages of photos. Thankfully, there is also a search feature. If you have time though, it’s nice to just roam around town.

Photos shot in this era were in a large format. The cameras were huge, the film that went in them was big as well, with 8×10 inches as common size. This produced an image that had incredible details. For example, the photo above shows a passenger train making its way from Harmar to downtown via the railroad bridge across the Muskingum.

Because the photos were scanned and stored at a very high resolution, you can zoom into the photo online to view the photo under great magnification. The photo on page 2 of today’s Times is the same photo, a piece of the same photo anyway. The detail is incredible. If you enlarge the photo, you can see a man on the bridge with a bike and that the engineer is leaning out of the window while he rings the bell of the engine. At the confluence of the Ohio and Muskingum rivers you can see two people in a rowboat. Across the river in Williamstown, you can see a smokestack for Fenton Glass.

The rest of the photos in the collection are just as detailed. A team photo from 1930 may very well display an extremely detailed photo of your grandfather as a high school athlete.

I cannot overstate how lucky we are that these photos existed. Cameras were normally so large that they had to be mounted on a tripod. Glass plates were bulky, broke easily and had to be handled one photo at a time. The fact that they were preserved all this time, and then were scanned and made public adds to how wonderful it is that they exist.

I own a camera from 1903 that I use when I talk to my photography classes at Marietta College. It’s a beast. The fact that it got used at all is remarkable.

There are school groups in the collection, photos of houses, photos of disasters and of parties. Fischer photographed daily life in Marietta for more than four decades. Now, 70 years after he finished, we can take a virtual walk in his shoes and enjoy what is truly a gift from the past.

Art Smith is online manager of The Marietta Times and has worked with The Times since 1977. He can be reached at asmith@mariettatimes.com.