J. L. BELL is a Massachusetts writer who specializes in (among other things) the start of the American Revolution in and around Boston. He is particularly interested in the experiences of children in 1765-75. He has published scholarly papers and popular articles for both children and adults. He was consultant for an episode of History Detectives, and contributed to a display at Minute Man National Historic Park.

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Monday, October 01, 2012

Lexington Is Turning 300

Lexington, Massachusetts, was founded in 1713, an offshoot of Cambridge. The town has started to celebrate its 300th anniversary, culminating next May.

Among this month’s kick-off activities, two thousand Lexington citizens (out of 31,000) gathered for a collective snapshot of the community today. Benn Craig took the photograph of that gathering above for Wicked Local.

The official town photo is a composite of several images by Joanne Rath, published in a regional edition of yesterday’s Boston Globe. On this Globe webpage you can see that photograph, and enlarge and pan across it to see individual faces. Note the Revolutionary War reenactors from both forces in the front row.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

It is a great picture of the community, but I am disappointed in the "stitching" process. Many of our community members have ghostly apparitions, disjointed appendages or in a few instances, have their heads removed entirely. Is it possible to take one high resolution photograph?

Bill Malone

J. L. Bell said...

I noticed some people being cut off at the joins as well, though they seemed to be the fidgety sort, who in very old photographs would have had blurry faces.

This sort of community portrait used to be made with a special panoramic camera than slowly panned across the crowd, recording a sliver of the scene at the time. It was thus possible for an individual to run from one side of the group to the other and appear in the photo twice. But I don't know if such images were crisp enough to zoom in on all the individual faces.