Previous Tentaclii picture posts on Newburyport — a key inspiration for Lovecraft’s “Innsmouth” — have included Along the Innsmouth shoreline, Newburyport – part one and part two. The images are now restored on these posts, after the site-move.
For this week’s regular ‘Picture Postals’ post I wondered if, some four years later, other pictures had become available? They had.
For context, above we see Newburyport showings its relation to its salt marshes and ocean coastline, on a U.S. Geological Survey map of 1934. Newbury and Ipswich are just south of this map.
This fine picture I found is probably fairly close to what the ‘local bus to Innsmouth’, which features in the famous tale, would have looked like. This combination carrier / bus is destined for a working life around Newbury, just south of Newburyport and in the middle of the marshes. The picture looks like it’s about the right time-period too.
Curious doings at Newburyport. A pamphlet by the aptly named H.P. Davis. Probably the same as the interior of haunted schoolroom in the photo I found and fixed in 2019.
On the Rocks, off Plum Island.
A curious Marsh Scene, Plum Island. Not one of the early pre-Photoshop montage ‘farm cards’.
School Street, Newburyport.
Inn Street. Newburyport.
An unusual garden, at the back of the High Street, Newburyport.
A (the?) tug-boat, Newburyport. 1930s?
And finally, readers will recall the U.S. submarine in “Innsmouth”. I couldn’t find one off Newburyport, but here’s one off the relatively nearby Newport.
Well, those are some newly found ‘picture postals’ that seem to chime with elements / atmospheres in Lovecraft’s “The Shadow over Innsmouth” (1931).