Photographer O. Winston Link may be best known for his ties to Virginia, home of the O. Winston Link Museum in Roanoke, but museum director Lynsey Allie says his ties to West Virginia are strong, even if fewer people know about them.
“O. Winston Link has fans all over the world,” says Allie. “Of course they come here, but many of our visitors also visit every link-related website they can find. They just can’t get enough of it.”
Link, who trained as a civil engineer before turning to photography, is considered a master at capturing the charm of country life in the 1950s and the last days of steam trains in the northeastern United States.
He created some of his best-known works in southern West Virginia, where he meticulously captured a nighttime scene in which trains race past a swimming pool and a drive-in theater in McDowell County.
It only makes sense for the Eastern Panhandle to highlight its connections, says Allie, director of the 17-year-old museum housed in a renovated Norfolk & Western Railway depot.
Link, who died in 2001, is buried next to his parents and other relatives at Elmwood Cemetery in Shepherdstown.
His father grew up in the almost forgotten hamlet of Duffields, halfway between Shepherdstown and Charles Town, and Allie said it was likely that E. Albert Link developed an interest in trains there as a child and later passed that enthusiasm on to his son when the family lived in New York City.
O. Winston Link, born in Brooklyn in 1914, began the project that brought him worldwide recognition in early 1955. His work as a commercial photographer in New York took him to Staunton, Virginia, for a shoot at a factory that manufactured window air conditioners.
There, Link became distracted. He loved watching trains at night, and when he visited nearby Waynesboro, Virginia, to watch the Norfolk & Western trains, he learned that the age of coal-fired steam locomotives was soon coming to an end.
He quickly decided on an ambitious, self-funded project: to photograph the final years before the N&W steam locomotives were replaced by diesels. By the time the last train was taken out of service in the spring of 1960, he had carefully assembled over 2,400 scenes.
He mostly shot after dark, when he could control the lighting, and in black and white, which was cheaper than color film, and made several trips throughout Virginia and parts of West Virginia, Maryland, and North Carolina to scout locations and complex synchronized flash system.
The project initially attracted little public interest, but after an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1976 and an exhibition of his work in London in 1983, the works attracted attention. Soon, demand for his incredible portraits was high.
Considered a perfect example of Link’s technical skills and eye for composition, “Hotshot” features a young man and woman in a convertible watching the Korean War epic “Battle Taxi” while a steam locomotive passes by and a jet fighter zooms across the screen.
The Baltimore & Ohio depot that Albert Link knew as a child still stands just off Flowing Springs Road in Duffields.
Built privately in 1839 by landowner Richard Duffield, the building is the second oldest Baltimore & Ohio depot still in existence. It is nine years younger than the station near Baltimore in Ellicott City, Maryland, a building that is now a museum.
In Albert Link’s time, the stop was the centre of the village – this is where farmers brought their goods to market and picked up their mail, this is where passengers arrived and departed, this is where telegrams were sent and received and later this was where the only payphone within a radius of several kilometres was located.
But during Albert Link’s early childhood, the historic Duffields Depot was abandoned when B&O built its own modern depot, a Victorian building that stood until 1942.
Since 1986, commuters have used the Maryland Transit Administration bus to get to work in Washington, DC. MARC train from a platform called “Duffields”.
The original limestone building, which has been vacant since 1884, is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The Jefferson County Historical Landmarks Commission has received preliminary grants to stabilize the building, with the goal of one day converting it into a museum.
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