Founded in 1870, historic Irvington serves as a time capsule to the bygone days of the Victorian and Edwardian eras. The once autonomous community along the Pennsylvania Railroad and U.S. Route 40 has a history as rich and spellbinding as the legendary tales of its namesake, Washington Irving. Featuring plenty of architectural diversity and notable citizens, Irvington served as the original home to Butler University and became known as a cultural, arts, and academic pillar of the Indianapolis landscape. Today Irvington continues to be the gem of Indianapolis's east side with locally owned shops and businesses along with a community that is committed to the past while focusing on the future.

Before there was a city of Fremont, there was the town of Irvington, and earlier still a busy crossroads called Washington Corners. Fields of grain once spilled over an open landscape, spurring production here of the first wheat harvesters in California. After local landowners built the Washington College of Science and Industry in the 1870s, they renamed its host town Irvington. By 1890, it boasted the largest, most advanced winery in the state and had earned the title, "Beautiful Irvington," home of gracious estates, apricot orchards, baseball, and first-class, high-bred trotters. Cows from Swiss dairy farms populated its green fields by the 1920s, and experimental airplanes dotted its blue skies soon after. In 1956, the City of Fremont absorbed Irvington, and its muddy sloughs were transformed into Central Park and lovely Lake Elizabeth.

Irvington, a small village 20 miles north of New York City, overlooks the widest point of the Hudson River. The 19th-century castles and chateaus built along "America's Rhine" have been replaced, yet Main Street remains almost exactly as it was in 1900.

Like a cherished old family album, this collection of more than two hundred fascinating photographs of Irvington brings to life people, places, and events of a bygone era. Although the Irvington depicted here--from the time of the Civil War to the 1970s--has changed significantly, its memory remains fresh in the minds of past and present residents alike. Culled from the extensive collections of the Irvington Public Library and Irvington Historical Society, this superb assemblage of images will stimulate many memories. Alan A. Siegel takes us on a delightful journey, starting when Irvington was a tiny village known as Camptown, to the twentieth century when Irvington was transformed almost overnight into a busy industrial and residential suburb of Newark. Shown too are the vital contributions made by successive waves of immigrants who flooded into Irvington during the first half of the twentieth century.