“Celebrate Virginia,” the group that is organizing a celebration of the 400th Anniversary of the arrival of English settlers in Jamestown in 1607, wants to borrow vintage photos from McLean and Great Falls residents.
The photos will be copied for use in exhibits, brochures, and publicity for events that are being planned.
Tom Jacoby, owner of the Langley Image Center and his staff will copy the photos as the owners wait. Later, the photos will be donated to the Virginia Room at the Fairfax branch of the Fairfax County Public Library.
“If a customer has an old photo, we make a copy, return the original, and post it on the wall,” Jacoby said. “I am trying to make it as loose as possible to get as many as we can. I think it is fun, just looking at the pictures. We are getting a lot of neat pictures,” said Jacoby. “The wall is growing. We are going to just keep it going. It is snowballing.”
“We have one photo of people wearing Civil War uniforms,” said Jacoby.
Another shows the Elkins trolley stop at Georgetown Pike near the point where the rail line crossed it. Old Dominion was later paved along the course of the trolley track.
Also on the wall are photos of the ladies’ auxiliary of the McLean Volunteer Fire Department, the merry-go-round at Great Falls National Park, the Chain Bridge across the Potomac between Arlington and Georgetown.
Another photo shows the interior of a house with a dirt floor on Old Dominion Drive, where goats once were milked inside the house.
“Life was very rural here until the CIA came in. People just don’t realize how rural it used to be,” said Carole Herrick, a member of the McLean Historical Society who collected photos for a historical book about McLean.
Prizes will be awarded for some of the photos, Herrick said. “We are just looking to drum up interest. People are dying, and we’ve got to get the photos they have of McLean.”
Conspicuously missing, said Jacoby, are images from the 1970s. “I don’t think people want to remember the 70s, said Jacoby, a McLean native who graduated from Langley High School.
Celebrate Virginia, the group that is planning events for the quadricentennial, will sponsor celebratory events through 2007, the anniversary year. “My big goal is a community parade,” Herrick said.
Celebrate Virginia has 30 members on its board of directors, a working group. A larger advisory board has also been formed.
Memberships are available for $15 a year; meetings are held at 5:30 p.m. every fourth Monday at the McLean Government Center on Balls Hill Road.