Vintage tourism images offer glimpse into New Brunswick's past

A woman sits outside a house working on a spinning wheel, logs float down the St. John River and a group of men watch as someone demonstrates how to work a chain saw. 

These are all individual images found at the Provincial Archives of New Brunswick. 

They're scenes people in New Brunswick no longer see in their day-to-day lives, but photo archivist Josh Green and provincial archives summer student Emily MacLeod peruse through images of similar scenes every day while working in the archives.

They've spent the last few summers scanning through more than 50 boxes of slides and prints from Tourism New Brunswick that date as far back as the early 1900s. While locations may be familiar, the landscapes and activities can look completely different. 

"The scenes that they were taking photos of for tourism in like the 30s and 40s were things that a lot of people back then would have found quite commonplace, but now are really interesting," he said in an Interview with CBC's Shift.

Green and MacLeod get more photos every year and they have to figure out what photos are worth keeping and which ones are just taking up space.

"There's a lot of stuff in those thousands or tens of thousands of tourism slides and photos that aren't fascinating to people right now, but we try and pick the best," Green said.

This is MacLeod's third year working as a summer student at the provincial archives and she said she still gets excited seeing photos of people doing activities that aren't commonplace anymore for the first time.

"Then you'll see it literally 200,000 more times and by the end, you're almost mad at yourself for having gotten excited in the first place," said MacLeod, who studies at the University of New Brunswick.

She said they have to be careful when sorting through different versions of the same story.

"One photo might have even the name of a ship where the second photo doesn't quite have the full name and things like that become important."

MacLeod said one of the most interesting photos they've stumbled across was of a clambake in 1903 outside of Saint John.

"We were so excited about the image, it was almost borderline pathetic," MacLeod said, laughing.

The pair still has thousands of photos left to go through.

"What I like so much about the job is that there's always something different going on and you're never doing the same thing two days in a row," she said.