Bill Price scours the internet for old black and white photographs and brings fragments of Florida history to life with color.

The Monticello native, now retired and living in Roswell, Georgia, has posted more than 150,000 restored photographs from the 1880s to the early 1950s on his Facebook page.

Images of the lives of ordinary people captured in everyday scenes provide insight to a Florida that evolved from a hardscrabble post-Reconstruction era to the beginning of the post-World War II boom.

There are snapshots of sharecroppers working in a field, a schoolteacher riding in a horse-drawn cart passing Tallahassee’s Old City Cemetery, and intersections and downtowns of various cities that look familiar yet different.

The 1907 Tallahassee Baseball Club, in front left to right; Hugh Wilson, Walter McLin, Perez McDougall. Back; John Pittman, O.M. Jacobie, Guyte P. McCord Jr., Ralph Grambling, Mr. E.B. Casler

In rural areas poverty is evident in the images of barefoot children in ragged clothes shyly posing and weathered-looking elderly people sitting with a look of exasperation.

One album includes a photo of the 1907 Tallahassee Baseball Club. A member of an early version of the Florida State League with teams also in Pensacola and Jacksonville, the Tallahassee squad featured the future chief judge of the 1st District Court of Appeal, and city park namesake Guyte P. McCord Jr.

And Price found and colorized the photo of Aunt Memory Adams. The formerly enslaved domestic worker became a national sensation when she sold a portrait of herself to raise money to attend the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago.

Price's massive collection of colorized photographs began as a restoration project of family photographs. He now has a massive library that includes specific albums for nearly all of Florida counties – 58 out of 67 – and others organized around topics such as “Early Florida Railroads,” “Daytona Beach late 1800s,” and “Captiva-Sanibel early 1900s.”

The Leon Saloon at the southwest corner of Monroe St. and College Ave. in Tallahassee, 1892

People have contacted Price after spotting a grandfather working on a farm or a relative in group photos that had been found in the State Archives, university libraries or Library of Congress, restored and posted online.

“They often ask if they can buy the photos, but I tell them they can just download them for free and do whatever they wish,” Price said.

He uses readily available software, to remove scratches, and other wear-and-tear damage that would distract from the image. Colors are infused into the photographs with a MyHeritage application and contrast adjusted with Photoshop Element to bring the image into sharper focus.

Colorization makes the photos “more visceral,” and enables “something familiar to be seen and explored with a different perspective,” Price said.

Still, critics of colorization call it cultural vandalism. They argue that implementing extra frames in film and adding color to photos takes away from what the original was and should remain.

Luke McKernan, a news historian and former curator of news and moving images at the British Library, dismisses the idea that colorization provides fresh insights as “nonsense.”

The Post's exchange lunch counter at Dale Mabry Field - Tallahassee 1942

The portrait Aunt Memory Adams sold nationwide to raise money to attend the 1893 World Fair in Chicago. Aunt Memory was sold to a Mr.Argyle for $800 when she was 24. A black-and-white version of this photo raised enough money for Aunt Memory to take in the World Fair. Bill Price

“Colorization does not bring us closer to the past; it increases the gap between now and then. It does not enable immediacy. It creates difference,” McKernan wrote in an essay on his website.

Price is unfazed by criticism: “It’s a hobby that I do for my own pleasure. If other people like it, that’s great.”

The retired Bell South executive has amassed a following of more than 19,000 armchair historians. He explains his new hobby combines two of his favorite interests – technology and history.

In the 1980s, Price set up and managed one of the nation’s first Metropolitan Area Networks (MAN) in Tallahassee as a Centel executive. A MAN is a computer network confined to a geographic location such as a city and represented a crucial step in the evolution of the internet. Later Price would launch BellSouth’s Internet Division in from Atlanta in 1995.

John and Mary Canada-Yates family, 1920 Orange County

History has always intrigued him. In a conversation he will casually begin to talk about a gray Christmas Day in 1970 he spent with sharecroppers grinding sugar cane on a Jefferson County plantation.

Or how as a Tallahassee Community College student studying archaeology, he lived in the woods north of town and learned how to make soap, cook on a wood stove, and tan hides into leather and furs.

“It’s just always been a passion,” the 69-year-old Price said of his interest in the past.

A Jacksonville family out for a ride in 1912

In 1974, Price left Tallahassee to join the U.S. Air Force. Four years with the Strategic Air Command was followed by a quarter century with three different telecommunications companies while a super-information highway known as the internet was introduced to the public.

Price retired in 2023 and a project to restore family photos sparked memories of his Monticello childhood that led him to a hobby rooted in his love of technology, history and Florida.

“There’s something magical about seeing old photos,” Price said. “And there’s a wealth of them on the internet.”