Longview 150 planners pose in period garb for magazine

Dressed in costumes depicting decades throughout Longview’s 150-year history, planners for the city’s sesquicentennial celebration in 2020 posed for photos Friday outside Central Fire Station.

From Uniquely Longview’s Kimberly Fish dressed as a doctor who worked at the former Harmon General Hospital in the mid-20th century to local Realtor Melanie Northcutt Crocker dressed for the 1960s and Councilman Ed Moore decked in his U.S. Navy dress whites, members of the Longview 150 Planning Committee posed with the city’s Centennial Bell as a picture-taking drone flew above Cotton Street.

Municipal employee Sherian Wilburn donned her timeless Longview Lobos long-sleeved T-shirt, and Griff Hubbard with Amtrak sported his original 1974 station agent’s uniform.

The photos will be used in the 2020 edition of Longview Chamber of Commerce’s annual magazine Uniquely Longview.

”The planning committee is going to have a page in Uniquely Longview, and so we’re each representing our favorite time period,” said Community Services Director Laura Hill, whose garb Friday was styled in the time of Longview’s founding in 1870.

Members reenacted a photo of Longview residents standing around the Centennial Bell outside Central Fire Station, also known as Old City Hall.

The bell originally was cast in Philadelphia in 1927.

”That bell was given to the city in 1970 by the Santa Fe Railroad, and we cleaned it up, and we have a new bronze plaque being made, because the other one just didn’t make it 50 years,” Hill said. “We thought we’d start reenacting photos.”

Other planning committee members participating in the photos were Lindsay Loy, Dr. Frank Jackson and Dena Dotson with the Gregg County Historical Museum, Brenda Dixon Coleman and Sophia Nisley Brewer with Longview NAACP, Gregory C. Adams with Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity Inc., Michelle Norris with Artsview Children’s Theater, Andy Khoury with the Historic Preservation Commission, Texas Ruegg with LeTourneau University and city employees Jennifer Eldridge, Willie Marshall and Shawn Hara.

For information about the Longview 150 celebration and planning, visit longviewtexas.gov/3534 .