An Answer to High Gas Prices
The photo shows genuine horsepower, fueled by oats, which were far cheaper and more available than gasoline was in World War II and now.
A horse and buggy was one an alternative form of transportation during the war, when the federal government imposed strict gasoline rationing.
An attendant at the Shell Station, which once stood across Davie Street from the old News & Record Building, fills a bucket with oats to energize the horse to keeping pulling the two-passenger buggy.
The station is long gone, with the site now part of what will become Center City Park. The former newspaper building survives as part of the Cultural Arts Center complex.
The houses down Davie Street have vanished, replaced by the center's outdoor theater and the YWCA's playground. The church steeple in the background has been removed but the buildings below it remain. The former First Presbyterian Church now houses the Greensboro Historical Museum, for which this photo came. During the war, the public library and other civic organizations occupied the former church.
The photo is among 350,000 negatives that the late Carol Martin, who photographed the city from 1938 until his death in the early 1990s, willed to the museum.