Travels With the WPA State Guides: Thomas Edison, Menlo Park, New Jersey

The American Guide Series, produced by the Federal Writers’ Project, is one of the most well-known WPA projects. Written as a collection of travel guides, the series included suggested tour routes as well as essays on the history and culture of each U.S. state and territory. Major U.S. cities and several regions were also given their own separate guidebooks.  

The state guides give a fascinating snapshot of American life in the 1930s. Written in a lively and approachable style, they detail and celebrate the rich diversity that our country displayed at that time. The writers’ enthusiasm is infectious and their guide is as much fun to read today as it must have been for travelers in the 1930s.  

Several historians have written about the American Guide Series over the past 80 years, but no one, to my knowledge, has used them as current-day travel guides. That is just what I set out to do. I am an American historian, art photographer, and enthusiastic traveler. I have read each of these guides. I love them for their wonderful enthusiasm and their curiosity about every aspect of regional life—from food, to linguistics, to folklore, to statistics, to geography, to environment, to history—and especially for their liberal attitudes and respect for diversity. In this series, I will be posting photo essays and articles based upon tours recommended in the guides.

Fern L. Nesson




Thomas Edison died in 1931. One of the world’s greatest inventors, Edison invented the phonograph, the microphone, the electric light bulb, the fluoroscope, the stock ticker, the kinetoscope, the rechargeable battery, and countless other more obscure inventions.

Edison’s lab was in Menlo Park, New Jersey, which, by the time of the writing of the New Jersey Guide, had begun to memorialize his contributions. The Guide reports the beginning of the construction of a tower on the site.

“MENLO PARK (355 pop.), is known for the SITE OF EDISON’S LABORATORY, marked by a rough-hewn granite boulder (R). In a hillside park behind the boulder stands the 129-foot MEMORIAL TOWER, topped by a huge electric light bulb about 14 feet high and 9 feet in diameter. The eight-sided tower is built of reinforced colored concrete. The great bulb is made of prismatic pyrex glass and illuminated by 12 lights inside. Bronze tablets to be placed on seven of the eight sides will tell of Edison’s inventions. A bronze and glass door will give a view of the perpetual light at the base, burning since 1929. The tower stands on the spot where the first incandescent bulb was made.

[F]or years following 1876, Edison worked night and day at Menlo Park testing thousands of ideas and materials. He even tried the red whiskers of

Mackenzie, the station agent, for a lamp filament and rejected them. The laboratory was lighted by gas when he began work. When he moved his shop to West Orange in 1887, the incandescent lamp was being used in many cities. Edison here developed his system of electrical distribution, his commercial dynamo, the carbon transmitter for the telephone, the phonograph, the automatic telegraph, and other devices […]

The glamor of great discovery has faded; Menlo Park now is simply a residential district.”

New Jersey Guide p. 485 (1939).

Well, not quite. There is still glamour to be found in Menlo Park. The tower was completed in 1938 and renovated in 2015. The bronze plaques are in place, the eternal light bulb shines from within the base of the tower and there is a giant light bulb sculpture at the entrance to the site.

Each year, on February 11, Edison’s birthday, the volunteer firefighters of Menlo Park lay a wreath at the base of the tower. I visited on an April morning when not another soul was around so I could not see the bulb at the top lit at night but, fortuitously, the sun was positioned just low enough to light it with natural light. It was an inspiring sight—a fitting memorial to the man whose greatest contributions was to bring light to the darkness.

April 11, 2022








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Fern L. Nesson is a graduate of Harvard Law School and received an MA in American History from Brandeis and an M.F.A in Photography from the Maine Media College. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She practiced law in Boston for twenty years and subsequently taught American History and Mathematics at the Cambridge School of Weston and the Commonwealth School in Boston. Fern wrote Great Waters: A History of Boston’s Water Supply (1982), Signet of Eternity (2017) and Word (2020). She is currently working on a combined history and photography book on the WPA’s American Guide Series. Nesson's photographs have been shown internationally at the Politecnico University in Torino, Italy, Les Rencontres de la Photographie in Arles, France, Ph21 Gallery in Budapest, Hungary and at The University of the West Indies in Kingston, Jamaica. In the United States, Fern has had solo exhibitions at the Grifffin Museum of Photography, MIT Museum, The MetaLab at Harvard, the Beacon Gallery in Boston, Massachusetts, the Pascal Gallery in Rockport, and Maine, and Through This Lens Gallery in Durham, NC. Additionally, her work has been selected for numerous juried exhibitions in the U.S., Barcelona, Rome and Budapest. Her photobooks, Signet of Eternity and WORD, won the 10th and the 12th Annual Photobooks Award from the Davis-Orton Gallery. Nesson’s photography work can be found at fernlnesson.com.

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