Photo Blends

One of the most challenging aspects of recreating photographs is lining up the shot "in real life" to match an image captured over 100 years ago. People don't look at landscapes in 4 x 5 boxes, so it takes a particularly keen eye to get the focus, angle, and zoom of each shot exactly right. It's even harder when the landscape looks completely different, as was the case for many of the Montgomery County scenes.

Photographer Barry Gartner did an exceptional job channeling the vision of his grandfather Lewis Reed while recreating the photos that appear on this site. Enjoy some of his best recreations below, blended old and new, sepia and color, then and now...

Black Rock Mill

The mill building ruins, standing amidst vibrant foliage today, in stark contrast to the working mill pictured from 1905. The tree branches in each version look like they're reaching toward each other, attempting to bridge the century.

Here, the obvious ravages of time on the mill building are merely in the background of a starker contrast between the turn-of-the-century Edwardian woman and the 21st century automobiles.

Views from Gaithersburg

This view of Walker Avenue, as seen from the bell tower of the Grace United Methodist Church, has changed hardly at all in the last 100 years.

The Thomas Hardware building has witnessed 100 years of progress, from the laying of sewer pipes to the selling of snowblowers.

The Gaithersburg train station also occupies the same space it did in 1911.

Roads

An unusual view in modern-day Montgomery County: a once-developed site swallowed by trees instead of replaced by a shopping center or a mixed-use development. Martin Thompson's homestead on Darnestown Road in 1907; empty wooded lot along Route 28 in 2023.

Veirs Mill Road spent decades as a rutted, muddy barely-two-lane dirt track, and took many more decades to transform into the four-lane divided highway it is today.

Transportation Landmarks

Though the C&O Canal has not been in active use for over 100 years, much of its infrastructure has been retained and maintained by the National Park Service. The lockhouses pictured below still stand and match their modern-day counterparts closely.

Above, the lockkeeper's house at Lock 25 (Edward's Ferry); below, Lock 24 and lockkeeper's house (Riley's Lock)

This photo-blend conceals an illusion: though the railroad tracks are the same, the building in the new photograph, serving as Barnesville's train station today, is completely different from the building that appeared on the right side of Lewis Reed's original photo of the Barnesville station standing in 1912. The original station building was torn down in the 1950s, replaced later with this historic brick metering station once owned by the Washington Gas Light Company .

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