Vintage Rockport

In honor of Earth Day today, we present this February 1973 photograph of Toad Hall Bookstore in Rockport, another photo from the series of Rockport photographs taken for the U.S. government by Deborah Parks.

Ever since its founding in 1972, Toad Hall has given 100 percent of its profits to environmental projects. Toad Hall’s founder, Nelson “Buck” Robinson, was an assistant dean at Northeastern University when the first Earth Day was held in 1970. Inspired to help the environment, he found his way to Rockport, bought the old Granite Savings Bank building, and opened the bookstore. (I believe that is Robinson in the center of the photo.)

Since then, the Essex County Ecology Center, which operates the bookstore, has gone on to fund a number of environmental projects. According to the store’s website, it has donated over $133,000.

Robinson died in December 2003.  He had been a graduate of Williams College, the University of Michigan Law School and Harvard Business School.

This postcard was postmarked in Rockport on July 31, 1909. The sender writes that the day before had been “96 degrees in the shade.”

I cannot make out the gold letters on the black sign above the store behind the wagon, but the white lettering in the window says, “Salada Tea.” Note the trolley tracks in the foreground.

The postcard was published by E.C. McIntire of Gloucester and printed in Germany.

Can you identify the people in these photographs? They are from a series of Rockport photographs taken for the U.S. government by Deborah Parks, a Rockport resident at the time of her death in 2010 and the wife of Winfield Parks, a well-known National Geographic photographer.