8 x 5 7/8 in. albumen photograph on 9 7/8 x 7 in. cardstock mount with recto pencil inscriptions including: "Parkers Landing. Pa." Featured here is a busy stretch of Main Street in Parkers Landing, PA, with storefronts bearing signage for the "Eckert House," a "Boot and Shoe Shop," an "Ice Cream and Refreshments" shop, "Billy Turner's Opera House," "A. J. Montgomery Livery & Teams," and others.

Parker's Landing was an oil boomtown that burst to life after the Civil War. Between 1869 and 1870 the area's oil output rapidly increased from 310 to 2,200 barrels per day, and cropping up everywhere were saloons, stores, hotels, livery stables, and machine shops. The population exploded similarly, with more than 20,000 people residing in the town at one point. Parker's Landing and nearby Lawrenceburg merged to form the city of Parker in March of 1873, and the Parker & Karns City Railroad opened in 1874. The inevitable bust came with the overall decline in the oil business in the late 1870s. Speculators clearing out of the area along with a tremendous fire in 1879 ensured the diminishment of the once-thriving boomtown.

[With:] 8 3/4 x 6 1/2 in. albumen photograph on 9 1/2 x 8 in. cardstock mount featuring lightly penciled inscription: "Swamp Lodge. / Imbrie Miller / Engineers Quarters. Phila & Erie Ry." Pictured is a log cabin in a large clearing, showing people looking out of the windows and doorway. Other people, including a child, stand on a log pathway to the right side of the structure.

Though we could find no other images of "Swamp Lodge," the structure is referenced in William Bender Wilson's History of the Pennsylvania Railroad Company (Philadelphia: Henry T. Coates & Co., 1899). He writes of Frank J. Firth, once an Assistant Engineer for the Philadelphia and Erie Railroad: "Subsequently he removed to Swamp Lodge, an engineers camp in the woods beyond the present location of Kane, and took charge of the construction of Summit Division of Philadelphia and Erie Railroad."