Now and Then

A musician, dog sitter and photographer, Jo Dheilly began her Past to Present Images matching up historical Wilmington images with present day scenery as a hobby. She is part detective in searching architecture from old photos, trying to find the exact spot a bygone photographer snapped a picture.

“When the images line up together, it gives me chills. I find it very ghostly, and it is cool because it (a building) is still there,” Dheilly says.

Her images evoke a sense of time standing still, where now-deceased citizens walk the same steps as current residents.

Dheilly likes the challenge of comparing a photo from the past to the present. Taking a duplicate is not always easy, because many old photos were small compared to today’s high-resolution images.

One image that overlaps includes prohibitionists pouring out alcohol on Water Street. The original image is from the New Hanover County library collection of photographs by Louis T. Moore, taken in the 1920s-40s.

Her tip for finding old architecture is to look upward; most owners only renovate the bottom floor of a building, so history is still evident on upper floors, and many buildings have a stone with the date it was erected etched in it.

She has become quite good at locating what used to be there.

“I can go to Wrightsville Beach and tell you where the trolley went and Lumina Station and all that stuff,” she says.

Dheilly moved to the area in 1984 and recalls that an old trolley was sitting on the Bradley Creek bridge then.

“I’m doing then-and-now comparisons right now. It is hard to line up trolley lines, the bridges are gone. When I moved here that trolley was still there on Bradley Creek, what was left of that bridge, it was just sitting there for quite a while,” she says.

Dheilly gets a lot of history help from the Wilmington Railroad Museum, Cape Fear Museum, and the Library of Congress. She is careful to point out that she cannot sell any photos that are not owned by the giver.

“It is hard work; those photos back then weren’t as big as they are today. And you have to get the copyrights. I can’t sell you these photos. I’m getting them online and you have to go to the library (or wherever) to get the copyright. I’m a musician and I’ve had to pay the government for an image I wanted to use on a shirt, so I know all about copyrights,” she explains.

People send her old photos all the time, because they like to share and keep the history alive.

“I don’t ask for any photos, they just want to send it to me. They know I like old photos, and it is neat to see,” she says.

Her photos are seen on Facebook’s Past to Present Images page.