Historical Photos opens at Cultural Center gallery

New York Mills photos This exhibit is one of the feature events at this coming weekend's 4th of July celebration of the 125th anniversary of New York Mills. The gallery of the Cultural Center will be open on Saturday, July 4, from 8 a.m. to just before the fireworks in New York Mills. Sunday, July 5 the gallery will be open from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. (Submitted photo) "Then and Now: Historical Photographs of New York Mills" opens in the Cultural Center gallery beginning Thursday, July 2, 2009. The show will be open to the public at no charge until Saturday, July 25. More than 60 historical photographs from the late 1800s to the present make up the show. The photographs are contemporary reprints of photographs in the collections of the Ottertail County Historical Society and the East Ottertail History Museum.

The subjects represented include architecture, the lumber business, railroads, schools and teachers, businesses and historical figures such as Fred Pilakoff, the Finnish Lion. Two photographs show the aftereffects of a Northern Pacific train wreck two miles west of New York Mills in April, 1913. There is a special collection of four photographs of the building in which the New York Mills Regional Cultural Center now owns from the earliest years after it was built by Oluf Pary.