To celebrate Annie’s work in and around Lowell, we’ve launched the 100 Posters Project. We are currently in the process of distributing 100 posters to local businesses, nonprofits and government agencies that now occupy buildings or have addresses on streets that Annie photographed one-hundred years ago. Our goal is to show how Lowell neighborhoods appeared in Annie’s time in relation to Lowell today.
Steve Syverson with Poster #8
About the 100 Posters Project
Poster 8 of 100
The Undertaker’s Gaze
Market St. near Dutton, Jan. 6, 1925
A man in front of an undertaker's sign. Another holding a list. And halfway between them, a pickax.
Fittingly, Annie Powell's highly staged and personal creation is, 100 years later, the site of Arts League of Lowell. They host this image as Poster #8.
Brother and sister Francis and Emma Regnier owned the funeral home (see 1925 City Directory ad below) behind the man at our right. Both men are likely drivers for the City Engineers transported Annie and her heavy equipment to document 24 construction sites on that busy Tuesday.
She staged the same man on the left to also consult a book or list that same day on Charles St. Here are the details:
1926 Lowell City ad for the undertaker in the image above.
All told, with the pickax in the middle of a city street, this fits into many other City Engineers and Proprietors of Locks and Canals images which seem to be one of her allegories about imminent death. She was a devout member of the small religious sect, Primitive Methodists, and records survive of her ministers’ Calvinistic sermons exhorting to prepare for death and the better life to come. They believed that God has predermined your moment of death and in this context, a man reading paper may represent the list of names.
Source: UMass Lowell, Crenter for Lowell History, City Engineers Collection