Goodbye Tumblr. You ruined it!
We are sad to say that we are discontinuing Once Upon a Town.
We started this blog in August 2013 with the aim to find, research and show historical photos in high resolution formats. The main idea was to present history as documented through photography - from the very earliest to circa mid-1950s. The large format quality we favored for our blog was chosen for its immersive properties. We wanted the past to come alive and to show you all just how much has been lost with ever increasing development, historical erasure and plain carelessness, but also to show just how quirky and eccentric many of our immediate ancestors were. Where possible we have included explanations for the images and in the process we learned a great deal about very niche corners of our recent history - and just how little we generally know about people and life from just over 100 years ago. It has been an enriching journey and we hope people who have followed this blog feel a little closer to the Victorians and Edwardians and homesteaders and flappers and dogs and cats and places captured on camera so many years ago. Much now is gone and only exists in these old photos.
In order to post this high resolution photography, we have since 2013 used a customized theme that allows large format to show on our website main page, which we recommend is accessed through a browser on a computer for a more immersive viewing experience. But thanks to Tumblr’s discontinuation of the legacy editor, this is no longer possible. The new editor they have forced down everyone’s throats (over the complaints of many) arbitrarily crops new posts and ruins the overall look of the website page. In short, it messes up the entire concept of what we have come to regard as a visual archive of the late 19th century and early 20th century. And while it still looks the same in the Tumblr feed, it’s the website most people outside Tumblr access and link to. This is our front page.
Regrettably it seems to be a trend among social sites to force unpopular changes on the people who create the content. They have become big and arrogant and care little for what users want. They keep “fixing” what isn’t broken by breaking them more. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Flickr, Deviant Art and now Tumblr have all gone through these self-destructive processes over the heads of their users and all have become worse platforms for it.
However, even though we will no longer post new material here - at least for as long as Tumblr maintains the discontinuation of the legacy editor - we will leave the site up for people to peruse at their leisure. Our old posts are, as of yet, not affected by Tumblr’s changes and we simply can’t get ourselves to delete ten years of collecting and research. We recommend you make good use of our archive and hashtags. There’s a bit of most of everything in the deep depths of this vast collection which counts thousands of images by now. And you might just stumble on something really weird that you didn’t know about.
At the time of writing this, Once Upon a Town has a total of 44,394 followers. We find that kinda impressive for a blog that doesn’t contain porn or manga. So here’s to all of you! We thank you for your interest and feedback over the years.
snowghoul
theartofmadeline
kianamaiart
stormborns
dededos
tangentwithtanner
dailybridgerton
