Publisher's Synopsis
Our town Mt. Pleasant, Michigan, is seen through cameras past and present in this largest ever photo historical review reaching as far back as 1875 to as recently as the summer of 2010. Matching vintage pictures with camera views from the same angle today, local historian and photo history veteran Jack R. Westbrook turns the same concise reporting of his five previous books again to his home town, describing what was there and what the more than 200 locations look like today. In addition to looking at people and businesses of the past and present, Westbrook turns the camera's eye on a number of historical homes and the folks who occupied them. The book is flavored by a local high schooler of the times description of life in the town in 1920, Westbrook's own 1956 high school essay on Mt. Pleasant when he was 16 years old and local interviewer and columnist Burnie Bonnel's inter views with notables of the past. This is the most comprehensive photo history of the town's growth from village to city ever published and will introduce the newcomer to Mt. Pleasant's heritage and provide hours of nostalgia to longtime residents, as well as being a welcome addition to any historian's bookshelf. A portion of the proceeds from the new book's sale will be devoted to the Veterans Memorial Library at Mt. Pleasant for the purchase of a ProScan 1000 microfilm reader system to replace the library's outmoded microfilm readers. The new machine will allow downloads, in a variety of electronic formats, of articles from newspapers past.
