William G. Andrews’s Brockport Through Time reprints photographs of the Erie Canal Village from the nineteenth century through the early twenty-first, with particular attention to images that show changes in buildings or locales over time, such as the athletic facilities of the original Brockport Collegiate Institute and the modern gymnasium at the State University of New York College at Brockport. Some images, like those of the Seymour and Morgan Reaper Factory, are from old newspaper illustrations, but the majority are photographs. Andrews offers the caveat in his introduction, “Very few photographs of buildings and places in Brockport before 1900 exist. The best sources of early photographs are picture postcards… Thus, the ‘time’ ‘through’ which ‘Brockport’ passed – as recorded in this book – is essentially from 1900 through 2014” (pg. 3).

In these pages, Andrews traces “changes in housing, the decline of the manufacturing industry, and the growth of the schools and the college” (pg. 3). An interesting addition is a table comparing types of business and professions on Brockport’s main street between 1907 and 2014, both for its similarities and the differences inherent in a modern college town. Andrews organizes the book into 6 sections: businesses, public buildings, residences, industry, transportation, and recreation. Each chapter grows successively shorter, possibly due to a lack of sources or the inability to juxtapose landmarks as the character of Main Street changed over time.

Andrews has written several previous books about Brockport’s history, including Early Brockport (2005, published on the occasion of the village’s 175th anniversary), Civil War Brockport: A Canal Town and the Union Army (2013, part of the History Press’s Civil War Series), and Brockport in the Age of Modernization: 1866-1916 (2018, part of the America Through Time series). He’s also written Around Brockport (2002) for Arcadia Publishing’s Images of America series of local history books. The current work, consisting primarily of photographs with explicatory captions, will primarily appeal to those who live in Brockport or in the towns west of Rochester, New York. It will also make a nice gift for students at or recent graduates of SUNY Brockport. For those interested more specifically in the history of SUNY Brockport, The Campus History Series’ State University of New York at Brockport by Mary Jo Gigliotti, W. Bruce Leslie, and Kenneth P. O’Brien will make an equally appealing read. ( )