This photo doesn’t show a 1895 car accident involving the only two cars in the US state of Ohio - FACTLY
Sai Krishna Muthyanolla
July 20, 2022
A photo is being shared on social media claiming it is a picture that shows an accident which took place between the only two cars in the US state of Ohio in 1895. Let’s verify the claim made in the post.
Claim: Photo showing an 1895 car accident involving the only two cars in the US state of Ohio.
Fact: The photo shared in the photo shows an accident that took place in 1932 in the Back Bay neighbourhood area of Boston in the US State of Massachusetts. This photo was captured by an American photographer named Leslie Jones. The photo does not show an 1895 car accident in the US state of Ohio. Hence, the claim made in the post is FALSE.
On reverse image search of the photo shared in the post, the same photo was found in an article published by a website in 2012. This article reported it as a series of vintage photos of auto accidents in Boston between the 1920s and 1950s.
When we searched for further details using these keywords, we found the same photo on the Digital Commonwealth website. This website mentioned that the photo was taken from the Boston Public Library in the US state of Massachusetts. Also, the website credited the photo to the US-based photographer Leslie Jones.
On searching for further details of this photo, we found the same accident picture on the official ‘Flickr’ handle of the Boston Public Library. Leslie Jones published this photo in his ‘Accidents-Auto’ collection with the title ‘Back Bay’. According to the description of the photo, this photo was from March 1932. The same photo was found in the portfolio of Leslie Jones. The ‘Business Insider’ published a photo showing another view of the same accident with a description, “Car and truck collide, Back Bay, 1932 (Photo: Leslie Jones)”. From all these pieces of evidence, it can be confirmed that the photo shared in the post was taken in the Back Bay neighbourhood area of Boston in the US state of Massachusetts.
When we searched further to check whether any such accident occurred between the only two cars in the US state of Ohio in 1895, we could not find any news reports confirming such an accident in Ohio. According to the fact-check article published by ‘Snopes’, this story probably would have originated from an advertisement for Mobile gasoline that was published in Life Magazine in 1967. But the photo included in this advertisement was different from the picture shared in the post. Also, there is no historical documentation available to confirm such an accident in Ohio.
To sum it up, this photo doesn’t show an 1895 car crash involving the only two cars in the US state of Ohio.