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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;916Bulldogs123, post: 312144, member: 75&quot;]Information on J H Eastman. Apparently he did well with post cards also. there is 60 or so on Ebay right now.</p><p><br /></p><p>While he was actually born in Michigan in 1880, his family moved to the wilds of northern California in 1886. By 1898, at the age of eighteen, Eastman was a practicing ‘view photographer’ in Sisson, which of course is now known as Mt. Shasta. By 1907, he was a partner in the Shasta View Company, and lost all of his burgeoning collection of photo plates in a fire in 1912.</p><p><br /></p><p>In 1921, Jervie Henry Eastman moved to Susanville and established Eastman &amp; Company as a commercial photography and post card studio. In 1936 he hired Mirl Simmons, a young photographer from Hillsborough, West Virginia, to help with the postcard photography. In 1947, Eastman and Simmons became partners. The business had expanded to provide photographic supplies to southeastern Oregon and studios in Westwood, Weed, and Susanville.</p><p><br /></p><p>By the end of his long career, Jervie Eastman and his company amassed over 13,000 images – contributing a prolific archive of our area in the 20th century. While his images of the construction of Shasta Dam and the highways that began to proliferate as access to rural areas began to be realized are important contributions to the history of the State of Jefferson, it’s his images of the downtown areas of our communities that really resonate. Towns like Klamath Falls, Weed and Alturas are frozen in time inside these arresting images, often easily attributed to a year by the automobliles in the photos. Eastman also understood the value of ‘kitsch’, evidenced by his images of playful bears, squirrels and other wildlife that probably sold very well in their time.</p><p><br /></p><p>Eastman retired from photography in 1959 and sold his share of the business to his partner since 1947, Mirl Simmons. Jervie Eastman died in Susanville in 1969.</p><p><br /></p><p>Mirl Simmons ran the Eastman Studios until 1980, when he retired and sold the business to John and Shirley Castle. Mirl Simmons died in 1987, in Jamestown, California.</p><p><br /></p><p>The Eastman’s Originals Collection (the historical postcards and negatives) was sold to Anne Fisher in 1982, presumably by Simmons. Fisher managed the collection until her retirement in 1994, when she donated the collection to the University of California, Davis.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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