This week, 2025 YSHS grad Liliana Herzog and YS Chamber of Commerce Executive Director Phillip O’Rourke published “Yesterday’s Yellow Springs: A Mid-Twentieth Century Image Archive,” an online collection of historical photos documenting downtown Yellow Springs in 1955 and 1960. The archive is the culmination of Herzog’s internship with the Chamber, completed in January as part of her studies at Oberlin College. (Photo by Lauren “Chuck” Shows)
Yellow Springs High School alumna unearths ‘Yesterday’s YS’
- Published: February 6, 2026
An internship at the YS Chamber of Commerce has turned into an unexpected deep dive into the village’s midcentury streetscape — and, now, a public historical photo project.
Liliana Herzog, a 2025 YSHS graduate, has spent the month of January at the Chamber as part of her undergraduate studies at Oberlin College.
“Part of the curriculum [at Oberlin] is completing three winter term projects,” Herzog told the News this week. “Some people stay on campus, some people leave; I chose to come home for the month and do this internship at the Chamber.”
Herzog’s tasks at the Chamber initially developed along practical lines; having hit the ground running after taking the Chamber helm 18 months ago, Executive Director Phillip O’Rourke said he hasn’t been able to “go through everything” in stock in the Chamber’s office in the YS train station building that could be put to use. The internship, then, presented an opportunity.
“I said, ‘OK, why don’t we just start with discovery,’” O’Rourke said.
Leaning into “discovery,” Herzog and O’Rourke first unearthed a cache of excess office supplies, which they used to coordinate a “supply share” with the wider community, inviting folks to take what they needed; whatever wasn’t claimed found a home at the nearby nonprofit creative reuse store Sister Trillium.
And then came the big find: a historical treasure trove.
While cataloguing various materials at the Chamber office, Herzog found a stock of old documents. Tucked among them were photographs, negatives and slides that, according to dates printed on the film and photo stock, show downtown Yellow Springs in 1955 to 1960. For historical context, the YS Chamber of Commerce was officially formed in June 1961 as the Business Organization of Yellow Springs, or BOYS; the group adopted its current name in 1987.
“We’re still not really sure why [the photos] were taken or who put them there,” Herzog said.
Herzog went to work examining the photos closely, identifying each building in comparison to the modern streetscapes of Xenia Avenue and Dayton Street and against existing historical data, noting seasonal clues, renovations and what was and wasn’t present from one frame to the next.
“Lamp posts, that was a big one,” she said. “It was like detective work.”
To help corroborate the dates on the photos and build a timeline, Herzog turned to Antioch College archivist Scott Sanders and the archives at the YS News office, matching dates, ads and events to details in the photos. Using a record of 1950s and ‘60s Little Art Theatre schedule flyers on file at the News, Herzog was able to pinpoint one photo almost down to the day: A poster outside the Little Art advertised that day’s screening of the Disney documentary “The Vanishing Prairie,” which was shown at the theater March 4–7, 1955.
Herzog built the timeline in less than two weeks, and during that time, developed a plan for not only her own winter term project, but also a public historical resource open to the whole community.
“Yesterday’s Yellow Springs: A Mid-Twentieth Century Image Archive” went live on the YS Chamber website this week. The archive encompasses views of the East and West sides of Xenia Avenue and the storefronts along Dayton Street, as they appeared in the mid-1950s and early 1960s, positioned alongside photos Herzog took this month of the same locations, viewed from the same angles.
Herzog described the online archive as a “look book” of all the photos she found; the project can also be viewed as a PDF, which links to a Google Drive with access to the historical photos and their modern counterparts.
Though it’s still unclear who took the photos and why, Herzog said the midcentury photos were “obviously methodically taken,” and theorized that they were likely a business-minded effort to catalogue downtown and its changes over a period of about five years.
With that in mind, O’Rourke said he believes the project’s value lies not only in adding to residents’ knowledge about an earlier downtown, but also in documenting the pace of change in the village — particularly amid ongoing discussions about the future of downtown Yellow Springs: Tom’s Market’s potential to become a co-op, YSDC’s purchase of the former hardware store, the evolving role of Short Street.
“Historically, you can see how things have transitioned, from light posts to buildings being renovated and consolidated,” he said. “It’s so interesting that we found them now, with all of the concentration on downtown and some of the conversations surrounding change.”
For Herzog, who said she’s still deciding on the focus of her overall study at Oberlin, the project was an opportunity to learn more about the town that watched her grow up and head off into the wider world.
“I think the reason I’m so interested in this project is because it’s relevant to me — I know what I’m looking at,” she said. “It wasn’t just learning about the history of a place I’ve never been to before. I saw these places every day.”
To view the project “Yesterday’s Yellow Springs: A Mid-Twentieth Century Image Archive,” go to http://www.bit.ly/YesterdaysYellowSprings
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