Apr 7, 2017 Orange County Review
Men from Orange, VA and neighboring counties at work for a paving company in Pittsburgh, PA. The date of the photo is unknown but believed to be in the early 1900s.
I have something a little different this week.
The Montpelier Foundation recently received the photograph posted here. The picture was donated to the vast Clara Ellis Payne Collection by Mrs. Clara Ellis Payne herself! We are grateful for her generosity, knowledge and willingness to share.
I chose to publish the photo with the hope that readers will be able to identify some of the men in the picture.
Mrs. Payne wrote the following about the photo:
“The enclosed photograph hung in my Uncle Fred’s room in our old home place in Orange, Va. Uncle Fred Ellis was born in July of 1876 in Orange, Virginia and he passed there on February 12, 1952 and is Int [sic] in the family cemetery on the property.
Thinking back a bit, I do believe it was Tucker McDaniel who left Orange, Virginia in pursuit of employment that was not open to him in Orange, Virginia. He returned to Orange and recruited our young men, and those he knew in Unionville, Louisa, Green, etc., to fill the openings in street paving- Pgh [sic] in Pittsburgh, Penn.