Sunday 10th Movember: Marathon, New York

If you google Marathon, New York these days you, of course, get reams of entries for the annual running race in which the worthy and the foolish run side by side for glory. Back in the 1870s, however, Marathon, New York meant simply the town of Marathon, named thus in 1828 but first settled way back in 1794. The town, still extant, is crossed by the Tioughnioga River which is a native word for the "meeting of waters." Imagine then this town in the late 1870s, and at the meeting of the waters a meeting of three men, newspaper men all, who convene in a bar for a quick invigorating brandy before heading over to Cortland Street to get their collective photo taken at Minard's Fine Art Gallery. Feeling pretty flush, they order themselves some hand-tinted cabinet cards for each of their wives alongside a batch of the more ordinary photographs for clients, before heading back to their office and to the more serious business of publishing a newspaper and, hopefully, making some money along the way...

Hand-tinted cabinet photograph. Marathon, New York, USA.