A Scottish writer bought New Castle, PA mug shots on eBay and rebuilt forgotten lives from newspaper archives, spawning the Small Town Noir project.
Key Takeaways
Six mug shots with police file cards still attached led to Lawrence County, PA arrest records from the 1930s-1960s, making subjects traceable by name and date.
NewspaperArchive.com back issues of the New Castle News enabled full biographical reconstruction, including a 1948 uninvestigated death case linked to a DWI arrestee.
New Castle peaked near 50,000 residents and hosted the world’s largest tinplate mill; it now sits at roughly 23,000 after deindustrialization gutted the Northeast.
The mug shot archive survived only because a retiring officer pulled hundreds of images from a 1990s police department trash purge; provenance is entirely accidental.
The project grew into Small Town Noir, a site chronicling an American town’s history through criminal records, pulp-noir aesthetics, and archival newspaper research.
