"Eastport was a village, it had a village-like quality as soon as you crossed that (Spa Creek) bridge," the historian, Ginger Doyel, said recently as she looked at the stack of black-and-white pictures.

The photos, taken to document a public works project, were all numbered, catalogued and indexed.

Ms. Doyel received them from an art gallery owner who discovered them by accident.

She said the find was everything a historian could hope for.

"I couldn't sleep Thursday night - I stayed up, looking at each one," Ms. Doyel, who is writing a history of Eastport, said recently.

As with all historical research, this discovery has given rise to even more questions. For example, one photo (No. 27) shows four little girls standing in front of a house near the corner of Chester Avenue and State Street, and Ms. Doyel said she is determined to find out who they were and what became of them. Her book, "Over the Bridge: A History of Eastport at Annapolis, 1868-1968," is expected out in mid-2008.

The Great Depression-era pictures were shot by Annapolis photographer Howard Hayman for the Annapolis Metropolitan Sewerage Commission, as the city was preparing to install utilities in Eastport. The photos documented the progress being made on the public works project, and they also recorded the surrounding landscape.

Eastport was not part of Annapolis when the photos were taken, and the entire collection of 291 photos included 104 shots of Eastport, 178 of Annapolis and six of the Naval Academy. Another three were miscellaneous photos.

Photo No. 194, for example, showed Harry Ivrey's Grocery Store in November, 1934, at 101 Compromise St., near the corner of Newman Street (then Chestnut Street) in Annapolis. The windows were filled with mounds of potatoes and canned goods stacked in pyramids. In one window, a poster announced a circus.

The building stood on what became the main thoroughfare connecting Annapolis and Eastport, and the site is now Newman Park.

Pip Moyer, who was mayor of Annapolis from 1965 to 1973, is a fifth-generation Eastporter. He has told historians what Eastport was like in the old days, and how empty the peninsula was.

"(I)f you stood on Chesapeake Avenue and rolled a ball, it would eventually end up in the water," Mr. Moyer, who now suffers from Parkinson's disease and is unable to talk much, told historian Beth Whaley in 1990. "It was almost an island; it had a magic about it."

Mr. Moyer talked of oystering, fishing and crabbing, the pastimes for a boy back then who lived in what he described as a "strictly blue-collar" neighborhood on the water.

"You'd walk through Eastport and you could always smell the copper from the boats," he is reported as saying. "You know, they had them up, working on them, and you could hear the 'clink, clink, clink.' It was the sound of summer, I always called it, and that was the caulking hammer, because boats would come open at the seams, the old wooden boats."

While the photos show a nearly-rural Eastport, they also document change.

Some pictures from the 1930s, for example, show a crew laying a 39-inch diameter sewer line on Chester Avenue, and others showed workers building a wastewater pumping station on Bay Shore Avenue.

In the background of various photos are houses, some of which are still standing - eight decades later.

One landmark, featured in photo No. 208, was the now-defunct Eastport Bridge. Built in 1907 to replace the 1868 wooden bridge, the steel swing span ran from Duke of Gloucester Street in Annapolis to what is now 4th Street in Eastport. That 1907 bridge was replaced in 1947 by the current drawbridge, which runs from Compromise Street in Annapolis to 6th Street in Eastport.

To understand the pictures fully, Ms. Doyel said, it is necessary to understand a quirk in Eastport's history.

The photos were taken some time from 1933 to 1937, but in 1938, six of the community's oldest streets were renumbered.

The old street numbers went from 6th to 1st, with 1st Street being the westernmost, and 6th Street being on the eastern extreme by the Severn River.

To allow for growth on the western end of the peninsula, the U.S. Post Office reversed the street numbers, to read 1st to 6th going from east to west.

In response to the 1938 changes, the old 6th Street, near the Severn River, became 1st Street, and 5th Street turned into 2nd, 4th into 3rd, and 3rd into 4th. As it turned out, the change proved irrelevant because the streets west of the new 6th Street generally were named for generals and presidents and were not numbered.

Ms. Doyel came across the batch of photos because Thomas Dawson, owner of Dawson Gallery on Maryland Avenue in Annapolis, was cleaning out his bookshelves at home on Kent Island, and happened upon a long-forgotten collection of photos in a binder.

Mr. Dawson said he quickly recalled that Ms. Doyel was working on a history of Eastport, and took the binder to her for examination.

Mr. Dawson said the photos belong to his wife, Pamela Ronsaville Dawson, who received them from a friend about 15 years ago.

When asked about the book, Mrs. Dawson laughed and described a typical domestic scene - she and her husband were cleaning out the bookcases, and he considered his books as treasures, and her's as debris that should be disposed of.

"We had kind of a little tiff," she said laughing.

Mrs. Dawson said she's looking for a way to make the photos available to the public, but she hasn't settled on a course of action.

"I don't know what I am going to do with them," she said of the photos. "I just don't know yet."

Historical tool

Ms. Doyel, a new member of the Annapolis Historic Preservation Commission who will be sworn in on Thursday, said the photos will help anyone who wants to maintain historical integrity while restoring the buildings captured in the pictures.

Several of the photos taken in April 1936, for example, show the McNasby Oyster Co. building, which was located on what is now 2nd Street.

Today, the building houses the Annapolis Maritime Museum, and the museum's executive director, Jeff Holland, said the photos have improved his understanding of the building's evolution.

"When Ginger showed them to me, I was just astonished," he said. "The clarity of the photos was just amazing, and it was like looking into a time machine, looking at the photos of 80 years ago."

Mr. Holland said the photos answered questions about how the McNasby building was altered and enlarged over the years.

"I had assumed the changes in the building were caused by the hurricane of 1933 ... But here is photographic evidence (from 1936) there wasn't extensive damage."

Mr. Holland said the photos illustrate a larger point about Eastport, as well.

Eastport was a place of farms and boatyards beyond what is now 6th Street, and remained largely undeveloped until after World War II.

Unique discovery

Mame Warren, daughter of famed Annapolis photographer Marion Warren, is a former assistant state archivist who specialized in photographs. She said she and her father knew Mr. Hayman, the photographer, but she had never heard of this collection of photos.

"Wow! Fabulous!" Ms. Warren said when told about the collection. "It sounds like a gold mine. There's nothing on Eastport like it."

Mr. Hayman maintained a shop at 29 Maryland Ave., and died in 1973. (Ms. Doyel has learned that his son, Howard Hayman Jr., was the photographer at her parents' wedding. He died in 2003.)

The photographs that the elder Mr. Hayman took are creating a buzz in academic circles.

University of Maryland archeologist Mark Leone, who has conducted excavations in Annapolis for 26 years and is looking to study Eastport, said the photographs will help scholars understand what stood where 80 years ago.

Anthropologist Matthew Palus, a Columbia University doctoral candidate who lives in Takoma Park and works with Dr. Leone, is doing his dissertation on Eastport.

"I have never heard of a record like that for another city in Maryland," he said. "I can't wait for the holidays to be over so I can come to Annapolis to look at them."