Picture perfect

DAYTON–Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, it is said.

The former Weinhard Hotel, now renovated and being readied for business as Hotel Hardware by Padraic Slattery, was made modern in the mid-1990s by Dan and Ginny Butler. The Butlers decorated the walls with exquisitely framed reproductions of historic photographs from Dayton's and Columbia County's past.

The frames were taken down and stored in the hotel in subsequent years, and Slattery and his crew discovered them in the process of making the building into Hotel Hardware.

Slattery toted the over 30 framed pictures to the Dayton Chamber of Commerce for distribution as the Chamber sees fit.

"The pictures have an undeniable connection to the legacy demographic of Dayton," commented Slattery. "It is only fitting they were donated back to the community so the photos can be honored and appreciated by neighborhood stakeholders with a vested interest. It has been an honor to be a local resident and a part of Dayton's revitalizing commercial district."

Chamber Executive Director Belinda Larsen has kept finding appropriate homes for the frames in the forefront of her mind. A picture of the Columbia County Courthouse was given to the County; the old U.S. Post Office at 163 E. Main Street, now the office of the Dayton Chronicle, was dropped off there; a picture of an early school house was appropriately conveyed to the Dayton School District.

One of the photos shows a bundled-up group of people in front of giant icicles which are cascading off the mill race at Flour Mill Park. There's Lulu Bell Newton and Mary Fry, posed together in one large frame. Elizabeth Forest Day, Dayton's first librarian, gazes serenely out of a frame destined to the Dayton Memorial Library. There's a group in front of Dayton's First Congregational Church.

A photo from the turn of the last century shows the brass band in the Spanish-American War time frame, and there are numerous enlargements of individuals, class group photos and family group pictures, their identities lost to the mists of time.

Dayton boasted a photographer, Minnie Moe, who photographed people and events in Dayton and the surrounding countryside, between 1900 and 1920. A number of "Minnie Moe" photographs adorned the walls of the Weinhard Hotel over the years and are now at the Chamber until their new home is found. Moe was born in Pennsylvania in 1877 and died in Dayton in June of 1969 and is buried here.