1941 Album With Photos of the Pacific Northwest and British Columbia

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This is a classic 1940s string-bound photo album documenting a scenic road trip along the Pacific Coast Highway. Beautifully captioned, … Read more This is a classic 1940s string-bound photo album documenting a scenic road trip along the Pacific Coast Highway. Beautifully captioned, it tells the story of two adventurous women who take to Oregon’s new coastal U.S. 101, just after it was linked together by five New Deal bridges in the Pacific Northwest, traveling up to Victoria and Vancouver in British Columbia.
Betty, who began her trip in Lake City, Modoc County in the far northeast corner of California, was a teacher. She was joined by Hollis, who presumably placed the photos and carefully wrote the captions in white ink on the black paper.
The album features a textured, faux-leather brown paper cover with a crinkled or alligator-skin pattern popular in the mid-20th century. The front cover is stamped with an Art Nouveau or early Art Deco styled border framing the word "Photographs."
It uses a traditional cord-tied binding through metal eyelets, which allowed creators to expand their albums by adding more black paper pages. The photos are secured using paper mounting corners, a standard practice of the era to avoid damaging prints with glue.
The album captures a specific window in American travel history. The late 1930s saw the completion of major coastal infrastructure project completions, like the Oregon Coast Highway bridges, which made long-distance coastal motoring highly popular. This trip took place just before wartime gas and tire rationing heavily restricted civilian road trips later in 1942.
Signature/Maker’s Mark: Nonexistent. Photos of all album pages are available upon request. See less