AMHERST — At the entrance to the Grange Store on North Pleasant Street in the late 1800s, several young men in period clothing and wearing aprons, posed for a black-and-white photo, capturing a slice of work life from more than a century ago.
In another photo taken in spring 2025, an apron-clad employee at Antonio’s, the popular pizza shop just a few doors down from where the Grange Store was once located, smiles as he greets customers.
The similarity of the images of the workers, despite being separated by more than 100 years of history, is an intentional aspect of Amherst Then & Now, a new pictorial exhibit and memory-making project that recently opened at the Amherst History Center on Boltwood Walk.
For curator Elizabeth Cardaropoli Dearden, a student in public history at Salem State University, the exhibit serves to explore, through professional photographs taken around the decade of the founding of the Amherst Historical Society in 1899 and contemporary digital pictures taken by Amherst Regional High School students, how memories are made and how they are kept.
“The human aspect really drives me; that is the essence of bridging the gap,” says Cardaropoli Dearden. “There is poignancy over the centuries.”
Inspired by the society’s milestone anniversary and its role as the memory keeper for the town for 125 years, and to create a shared voice for what memory-keeping looks like in the modern day through the eyes of students, the exhibit is a retrospective on the town itself, and its people, places and daily life.
“An important part of the memory-keeping is the now,” Cardaropoli Dearden said.
Selecting photos from collections held at the Jones Library, and limiting the pictures to those taken between 1895 and 1905, Cardaropoli Dearden provided these to 62 students taking a quarter-semester-long digital photography class taught by Elena Betke-Brunswick last spring, where they could do their own interpretation and have a juxtaposition of placemaking.
Spending time with their digital cameras, mostly in downtown Amherst, the students sought to either recreate or be inspired to provide a modern perspective, so the new images could be placed side by side with the historic ones.
Cardaropoli Dearden said she appreciates that students, through the class project, are truly taking ownership of their hometown, learning more about the past and how it intersects with the community they are living in. Their endeavor gave them a shared sense of space and a starting point for their lenses to understand who’s depicted and who’s not.
Raquel Mazur, an Amherst Regional senior who was part of the project last spring, recalls taking about 100 photos a day during the class and then editing and submitting the best of these.
“It was really cool to be able to reflect on what Amherst has grown to in the last 150 years,” Mazur said, adding that she sees differences and similarities, with some of the same aspects and philosophies in the people in the photos from then and now.
“I tried to encapsulate the personality of what Amherst was then and what it is now,” Mazur said.
One of Mazur’s images in the display shows the Amherst Town Hall with a vehicle traveling on Main Street past it, mimicking the 19th century photo of the same building and from the same perspective, except in that one a horse-drawn carriage is in place of the car.
Cardaropoli Dearden said Town Hall was by far the most photographed building.
Betke-Brunswick said the students started the unit by looking at all the historic photos and then went to downtown. “Students were able to interact with a lot of people in the community, and people liked engaging with the students,” she said.
While some of the photos are one to one, they are not all exact clones, so a contemplative man in fancy clothes and hat in the historic photo is replaced by a contemplative man in more casual clothes last spring.
Other pictures show a turn of the century livery truck with boxes piled high on it next to a UPS truck parked in front of the same downtown commercial block; the train station off Main Street with railroad staff or passengers on the platform replaced by high school students standing on the same deck; and a portrait of young women at the historic Burnett hat factory, seeming in a jovial mood, next to an image of high school age girls in 2025, also appearing to be in good spirits.
Two of the photos are a panoramic view looking up Main Street separated by more than 100 years, yet many of the same buildings are in both, though the new photo has the enhanced greenspace of the North Common and the Bank of America building that replaced the burned down Amherst Hotel.
“The panoramic is very striking,” Cardaropoli Dearden said. “You can see differences and similarities in the town.”
Another panel has photos of the Strong House, including one with a family and another with staff and members. “It is part of the history and the holder of the history,” Cardaropoli Dearden said.
One of the discussions for the students was who’s missing and who’s not represented in the photos and the biases that likely existed. Much of the photography is drawn from the collection of John Lovell, a prolific photographer with more than 1,000 photos of downtown who founded one of the first photography studios in the region.
But even though a Chinese family was in town at the time and running a business, and African Americans lived in town, they are not present.
“The silence and gap in the archive is explored in this exhibit,” Cardaropoli Dearden said. A display panel refers those who want to uncover this to Ancestral Bridges located on Cottage Street, a museum offering about the families whose histories are largely erased.