SCHS / Photo of the Week, 5.5.25: Edward Lange’s ‘Lower Main Street, Northport, 1880’

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Photo of the Week

May 5 – May 11th, 2025

FROM THE SCHS LIBRARY & ARCHIVE

“How shall we know it is us without our past?”
– John Steinbeck

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Lower Main Street, Northport, 1880 (B&W photograph of a watercolor painting by Edward Lange of Greenlawn). (Image from the Collection of the Suffolk County Historical Society Library & Archive. Copyright © Suffolk County Historical Society. All rights reserved.)

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Edward Lange (1846-1912) came to the United States from Germany in 1870. He settled on Long Island and began a career as an artist, entrepreneur, and salesman. Over the next almost 20 years, Lange created more than 150 watercolor paintings and sketch drawings of homes, farms, businesses, downtowns, and village centers in Suffolk County, Nassau County, and Queens. Taken together, Lange’s scenes of homes, farms, and towns give us an important record of the appearance of nineteenth-century Long Island, yielding information about our architectural heritage as well as landscape tastes and fashions of the time period.

This black & white photograph of an Edward Lange watercolor painting depicts the lower Main Street portion of Northport in or around 1880 when the artwork was created. Northport, formally laid out as Bryant’s Landing in 1790, was originally a loose cluster of dwellings known as Cow Harbor.

Suggested Reading: Dean F. Failey & Zachary N. Studenroth, Edward Lange’s Long Island (1979).

by Wendy Polhemus-Annibell, Head Librarian

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