The Old Seat

When this 1929 photograph of Arthur J. Raymo came across the scanner, I recognized the footbridge in the background having seen it before. In his mother's photographs from 1905 there is an image of the same bridge.

This 1905 photograph was taken on Arthur E. Raymo and Margaret A. Merrow's honeymoon trip to Niagara Falls. After a google search turned up a vintage postcard of the same view, I could confirm it was a footbridge over the Niagara River to the Three Sisters Islands. I can find no contemporary photographs of the bridge so my assumption is it no longer stands.

What I find interesting here is that in a 1923 letter Arthur E. Raymo sent his wife Margaret while on a business trip to the Niagara area, he wrote:

My Dearest Wife and all - I have sure had some go today. Early this AM for walk to place above fall where we sat, the morning after we were married, think I was at the same old seat.

It seems plausible that in 1929, while on their road trip north, the widow Margaret brought her four children back to "the same old seat" that her and Arthur both had fond romantic memories of.