Taylor Oliver
When Joe Richardson started the Facebook group Old Images of Baton Rouge back in winter 2015, he was worried he’d be the only one posting yellowing photos of the capital city.
“Boy, was I wrong about that!” Richardson said via Facebook.
The group now has more than 14,000 members with multiple posts per day.
The old adage that a picture is worth a thousand words couldn’t be more true in Old Images of Baton Rouge. Inspired by other groups of the kind, Richardson noticed there wasn’t a page for old photos of Baton Rouge, so he took the next step and created one. Though he later found that other groups like his did exist, he kept running the group.
“I love old photos and learning about history, so this has been a lot of fun for me,” Richardson said.
Richardson doesn’t post any of his own family photos (he says he doesn’t have any good ones), but he swaps photos back and forth with other Baton Rouge photo groups and posts images from old LSU Gumbo yearbooks.
There’s photos of former Louisiana Gov. Huey Long lying in a casket, shots of stores that no longer line the streets of downtown and pictures of LSU’s campus in its early days. To a history buff, it’s fascinating. To a Baton Rouge resident, it’s still pretty interesting.
“Maybe 12 cars that aren’t black? Brand new baseball field (LSU Diamond) that would later be named for Alex Box, a former LSU student athlete, and WWII hero killed in action,” said Facebook user VJ Paola in a photo caption.
“It was a friend of my moms. She passed away and didn’t have any kids to pass it to. It was in a box of her photos.”
Editor’s Note: The print version of this story included the wrong caption above the photo of the house on Main Street. DIG regrets this error.
