About Gordon Landreth

Goron Landreth was my grandfather. He was a talented amateur photographer who made over 50 albums of his work, carefully gluing his photographs on to their thick black pages, along with hand cut-out captions that he typed himself on his electric typewriter. This site is a collection of those albums.

Gordon was born in Florida in 1909, where his father was trying to grow tobacco, but his family moved back to Lancaster County, PA, shortly afterward (his mother, Blanche, had grown up in Lititz and Reading, PA). His father started a cigar manufacturing business in Reamstown, which was successful enough that by 1914 they had moved to the city of Lancaster. Gordon went to Franklin & Marshall College, where he excelled in both tennis and academics, winning their highest achievement award, the Williamson Medal. In the midst of the Great Depression he found work as a bank teller. In 1937 he married Kathryn Kreider, the daughter of a Mennonite Bishop, even though Gordon was a committed atheist.

Around this time Gordon developed an interest in photography, and Kathryn was one of his first great portrait subjects. They had four daughters: Nancy, Cindy, Kathy, and my mother, Louise, who also became regular subjects of his photos. By the early 1940s he had left the bank to take a job with a life insurance company, where he stayed for the rest of his working life, ending as Vice President and Treasurer. He was active in his local chapter of the American Business Club, the F & M Alumni Association, and the Lancaster County Republican Party.

With his growing family, he loved to go on long driving vacations, and during these trips, often to distant national parks, the scope of his photography expanded too. Now even back home in Lancaster, he would begin taking landscape photographs, often featuring the Amish country and its farms. Later he would lead bus tours through the area. By the time his grandchildren got to know him, he always had a camera around his neck, a light meter, and a cigar. We grandkids also knew him as an avid bird watcher, who kept feeders outside the window of his home office, and a squirrel trap on the ground nearby. He documented everything: the birds he saw, the 990 squirrels he trapped (which would then be put in the trunk of his Buick and released into woods a few miles away), and of course his many photo albums.

He died of lung cancer in May 1991, survived by his wife Kathryn, his four daughters, and seven grandchildren.

Gordon’s biography was written by his first grandson Gordon Blake Strawbridge.

This website

This website is an arts-link.com project created using open source software and tools. The website is built with hugo using hugo-theme-gallery and hosted on cloudfront in an S3 bucket.

Important Notice

Please respect the ownership of these photos. All images on this website are the property of Gordon Landreth’s family and are not in the public domain. Just because these photos are accessible online does not mean they are free to use, copy, or distribute. We kindly ask that you do not steal or misuse them. Thank you for your understanding and cooperation.