TOWNSEND — Bob Arnold’s upcoming presentation will include the story along with scores of photographs from his family’s 18,000-mile 1927 road trip around the United States in a Ford Model T.
“This is a fascinating program which I saw in Sturbridge last year,” said town resident John Barrett of the event taking place on Sunday, May 3 at 2 p.m. in Memorial Hall, 272 Main St.
He added that the Yankee Ingenui T’s, the local chapter of the Model T Ford Club of America, in conjunction with the Townsend Historical Society’s celebration of America’s 250th birthday is sponsoring the event that showcases the epic adventure that took place nearly a century ago.
Arnold said that in 1927 his grandparents Carey and Maud Melville made an eight-month-long road trip with their three children. Packing everyone into a Ford Model T Touring Car named Hubbub with attached trailer, the Melvilles left their home in Worcester in January of that year with the objective of traveling the entire periphery of the United States and, as his grandmother noted in one of her many journals, “…finding out-of-the-way places and experiencing the natural wonders the country had to offer.”
“The issues these travelers encountered stand in sharp contrast to what we find when we set out on a road trip today,” Arnold said. “Many roads were unpaved and unnamed, often little more than trails that were muddy in the rain and dusty the rest of the time, and the business of providing travel and roadside amenities from gas to food was in its infancy — often with options few and far between.”
Carey Melville had taken a year-long sabbatical from his teaching position at Clark University, which provided the time for the road trip. He was an accomplished amateur photographer and more than a hundred of his photographs from the trip are featured in the program, “illustrating both the joys and the trials of cross-country travel in 1927,” Arnold said.
He himself is a freelance photographer, amateur historian, and avid collector of all things Sturbridge, where Arnold has called home for well over half a century and he lives with his wife Susan, their dog Jesse, “and thousands of images.” In addition to serving clients throughout New England, Arnold has been documenting life in his community since he and his family moved to Sturbridge in 1970.
His work over the past 55 plus years has yielded in his words “a unique perspective on the commercial, cultural, and environmental changes in our community” — and his ongoing efforts related to “digital preservation of documents and photographic images assures that future generations will have access to the visual record of our past.”
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