I got email a few days ago from Coyote Crossing reader Anthony Edwards, who asked:
I was wondering if you had seen Burton Frasher’s photos of Centennial Flat from the 20s? I am going to try and find some of the Joshua Trees if they are still standing and do a comparison when I am there in two weeks.
I hadn’t. After a couple days, when I remembered I hadn’t actually answered Anthony’s email yet, I responded, asking if he had a link to some examples. He sent a few last night.
Burton Frasher (pronounced “Frasier”) was a Colorado-born photographer who ran a phenomenally successful postcard business out of Pomona, California. He sold millions of postcards during his lifetime, mainly by way of tourist concerns in the Southwest — railroad stations, hotels, attractions along Route 66 and its forerunners, like that. He died in 1955. His collection was donated to the Pomona Public Library, which has conserved them. It includes portraits of native people and settlers, animals, townscapes, and wildland scenery. Among Frasher’s Centennial Flat photos was this one, dated 1926 and entitled “Coso Springs”:
Centennial Flat is a place I’ve spent a little time, and I was wondering if I might recognize any of the individual Joshua trees even after eighty years of change. That little one in the middle there almost leapt out at me. Let’s take a closer look:
It was all there: the vertical trunk offset slightly rightward after the first branching, the doglegged lower left branch and matching one on the right, the general configuration of the branches above that three-way split, all familiar.
Anthony won’t be able to get a photo of the live tree when he visits this month. It’s been dead for about a decade, and lies wizening where it fell. But there’s a guy who got a few photos of the tree in 1986, exactly 60 years after Frasher was there, and it’s interesting to note the changes the tree did go through before it succumbed. Here are a couple of those later photos:
Thanks for the heads-up, Anthony.
Nice! I’m glad you were able to help him find what he was looking for.
And gee, there is a line on that horizon. Good thing, or I’d get vertigo.
Hope we don’t have to hear the rattle and hum of transmission lines near there.
Do the streets really have no names there? And do people build and burn down love there too? Closer to Palmdale, there are names with no streets (like 130th “street”), but I’ve never seen any burning love there either.
Nice find. I like Calipidder’s write up of her visit of the area, with photos.
http://calipidder.com/wp/2009/12/cerro-gordo-and-u2s-joshua-tree/
I have to visit the area.
Oh fer… In the name of love, Larry.
Haha! I have actually been to Palmdale, that was to go visit Frank Zappa’s old haunts though. I had my suspicions about the ones in the photo, but without being there again, I was doubtful. Now I see it, especially the three way split and the way the tree divides off into two sections.
Stunning images, particularly in black and white. The images are somewhat haunting, as if the tree holds mysteries are from the past.
Thanks. This will remain in my mind’s eye for quit some time.
Bill
Oh, that’s very cool. Very very cool.
From Derek’s link, the third of the series.
Larry, you should be ashamed of yourself.
Noo, noo, not the punitentiary! So cruel!