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ALBANY, N.Y. Dirt roads. Front porches. General stores. Crossroads Images: Postcard Views of Rural New York will take State Museum visitors back to a simpler time, a time before four-lane highways crisscrossed the state and strip malls dotted the landscape.

Postcard Views can be seen at the Museum from June 18 to Jan. 2, 2000, in the Photo Gallery. The enlarged images will be taken from the Museum's extensive collection of Eastern Illustrating and Publishing Company postcards. Eastern photographers, based in Belfast, Maine, traveled by car in upstate New York about 1916, 1920,1925, 1932 and 1935 capturing images of rural life for use on postcards. The Museum's collection totals 2,276 cards, mostly of western, central and northern New York, drawn from four sample albums.

"They're nowhere and everywhere," curator Geoffrey Stein said. These were places where the larger publishers didn't go, like Cato, Altona and Odessa, he said. The images show a time when many people's lives centered around these crossroads communities.

The earliest views of rural New York depict an established agricultural community with few changes since 1875. Some of the postcards show gas pumps or community water springs right in the middle of roads.

"But things then changed very quickly with the introduction of the automobile allowing people to shop or work in urban areas far from home," Stein said. The later cards document those changes, often demonstrating how many hamlets declined.

Several postcards show a photographer's car parked on Main Street with the back door open for stowing equipment a quick getaway once the shot was captured, Stein said.

The 261 postcards used in the exhibit will be divided into 10 sections: Landscape, Commerce, Institutions, Houses, Churches and Lodges, Rural Industries, Social and Cultural Offerings, Public Works, Travelers' Accommodations and March of Time (showing before and after images).

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*For slides, please call 518/474-0079.