Marmaduke Wyvill “Duke” Boyd by B. W. T. Phreaner

Son of Maryland Free Press printer Andrew George Boyd (1825-1885) and Catherine Hawken, “Duke” Boyd (1850-1876) was named for his grandfather, a wealthy Washington County farmer and surveyor born in 1790.

Duke attended Washington and Lee University in Virginia, and became a printer and newspaper editor, like his father. What little is known about him comes from the research of a diligent findagrave.com volunteer, who has posted obituaries for Duke and his parents. All are buried in Rose Hill Cemetery, Hagerstown, Maryland.

This carte de visite portrait of Boyd shows him in the vigor of young manhood. My guess is that Phreaner took it  in the early 1870s.

Bascom W. T. Phreaner (1845-1932), son of Hagerstown tailor William Phreaner and Emma Wagner, was working as a photographer in Hagerstown by 1870, and according to census records, continued in the trade until at least 1910.

According to a 1911 article in the Baltimore SUN, Phreaner began learning photography in 1860, at the age of 15, in the studio of Elias Marken Recher, and set up for himself in 1866 (“Through a Foothills Eden with a Camera,” 7 May 1911)–but Phreaner was advertising for himself in the Hagerstown Herald and Torch Light as early as 1864.

The article describes Phreaner’s delight in rambling the countryside with his kit to take landscape views as well as views of Antietam’s battlefield.

A 1958  letter to the editor of the Hagerstown Daily Mail recalls Phreaner as “a tall, dignified man, well-read, dignified, scholarly,” who used no stronger language than “gosh dog” (Hagerstown Daily Mail 16 April 1958).

Phreaner sold his studio about 1908 and continued working from his Potomac Street home. He died at the Hanover, Pennsylvania home of his son, Leighton K. Phreaner, in March 1932, and  is buried in Rose Hill Cemetery, Hagerstown.

Church of the Holy Trinity, Oxford, Maryland

Cartes de visite and cabinet card photographs of notable buildings and places in Maryland are always exciting to find.

This cabinet card by Aloise Reiser of Easton, Maryland depicts the one of Talbot County’s better known churches, the Episcopal Church of the Holy Trinity on South Morris Street, Oxford Neck.

According to the church’s brief historical sketch, wealthy Talbot County landowner General Tench Tilghman of Plimhimmon was the driving force behind the establishment of a third church in the parish in 1852, but the war and the population loss brought about by the closure of the Maryland Military Academy left construction to languish incomplete until the end of the nineteenth century.

The building, designed by influential ecclesiastical architect Richard Upjohn, was completed in 1894. According to Kelbaugh’s Directory of Maryland Photographers, the photographer, Reiser, was working in Easton from 1894-1897, so it seems plausible to suppose this photograph was taken during that period.

An Aloise Reiser, born about 1868, Bavaria, is listed in the 1880 census of Chapel, Talbot County, Md., son of carpenter Johann Reiser; this is the only trace of the photographer I have found in vital records.

In Where Land and Water Intertwine: An Architectural History of Talbot County, Maryland, historian Christopher Weeks says the church was completed and dedicated in 1892, without “the tower called for in Upjohn’s original plan” (Weeks, 212).

The church, according to Weeks, underwent some alterations after it was rebuilt following a 1945 fire: “the entrance was relocated from the north to the west facade with a circular window above; and the chancel was enlarged.”

This view is from behind the church, looking in through the windows above the altar and chancel. The Easton Diocese of the Episcopal Church has a small modern photograph that offers a slightly fuller view of the church from a similar angle.

Anonymous Stereoview of West Baltimore Street Photographer’s Studio

This stereoview of the 100 block of West Baltimore Street has no publisher’s or photographer’s credit. Its value lies in its depiction of a photographer’s studio and gallery.

The studio skylight, and even displays of photographs in display windows, can be discerned just to the right of Neal’s Dry Goods. George H. C. Neal and Son, Dry Goods, occupied 99 and 101 West Baltimore Street at Holliday Street during the 1870s. The E. M. Cross & Co.Baltimore City Directory for 1863-1864 has an ad for George H. C. Neal’s dry goods establishment at 97 West Baltimore Street.

Palmer Lenfield Perkins, “photographist,” is listed in Woods’ Baltimore Directory as early as 1858-1859 at 101 West Baltimore Street. Perkins  occupied this or nearby premises, including 103 West Baltimore,  through 1881 at least.

Another photographer, Charles P. Lusby, occupied 103 West Baltimore in 1880.

William C. Darrah’s The World of Stereographs offers a system for dating stereoviews, based on the type of mount and print. I do not have the skill and experience to date the card. The mount is relatively thin; the print surface lustrous, indicating albumen. This suggests an earlier rather than a later date.

Based on the presence of Neal’s Dry Goods and directory listings for photographer P. L. Perkins, this view could have been taken as early as the 1860s.

If you can help pinpoint the date of this view, please let me know.

Stereoview of William T. Walters House “St. Mary’s,” Govans

This stereoview depicts the Baltimore County country home of William T. Waltersand family, “St. Mary’s.” No publisher’s name appears, but it strongly resembles views published by William M. Chase.

Another view, taken from the side, was published in William and Henry Walters: The Reticent Collectors, by William R. Johnston. Johnston dates the view to ca. 1875, and the house depicted there is consistent with the house we see here.

According to Johnston, the original 32-1/2 acre estate on Woodbourne Avenue was purchased in 1866 from Augustine Kohler. Walters enlarged it to 130 acres, and spent much of his time after the war cultivating gardens and orchards, and raising prize fowl, cattle, and Percheron horses brought from France.

The property stretched from Woodbourne Avenue north to Belvedere Avenue, and included a gatehouse for the tenant farmer, a large carriage house full of a wide variety of vehicles, a hothouse, stables, a bowling alley. and a small lake created by damming the stream, Chinquapin Run, that ran through the estate.

The house itself was “an 18-room frame structure with a tower built in the Italianate style” (Johnston, 47). The estate was sold in 1924; the house was razed and the land became part of today’s Chinquapin Run Park.

The large bronze mastiff statue next to the entrance was originally installed “on the portico of Mrs. William Gilmor’s house facing the Battle Monument” (Johnston, p. 48).

According to author Susan Taylor Block, after William’s son Henry T. Walters married Sarah “Sadie” Jones, the widow of his close friend Pembroke Jones, Walters moved the mastiff bronze to her estate, “Airlie,” in Wilmington Cove, North Carolina.

Today Airlie is a public gardens; the bronze mastiff statue was displayed for many years  on the Newport, Rhode Island estate of Jane Pope Ridgway (1917-1911)

Busey Beginning: “Mr. Packard, School Teacher in Liberty Md”

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

According to Kelbaugh’s Directory of Maryland Photographers,Virginia-born artist and photogapher Norval Hamilton Busey (1845-1928) opened his first independent gallery and studio in York, Pennsylvania in 1867. York Area Photographers 1840-1997 (spelling his name “Norvel Bushey”) places him in York 1868-1869, after which Busey moved on to Baltimore.

Busey was one of a number of photographers who tenanted the studio in  “Rupp’s Building,” or the Rupp Building, on York’s main square, between 1847 and 1900 (York Area Photographers 1840-1997).

He was the son of a Methodist minister, the Rev. Thomas H. Busey. Rev. Busey died when Norval was about 11, so he was raised by his mother, Sarah Neely McLanahan Busey.

Norval married Miss Emma V. Laley, the daughter of a Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia armory worker,  in 1866, and they had four children: Blanche, Rosamund, Ina, and Norval Hamilton Busey Jr.

Sometime between 1880 and 1900 Busey moved his family to Manhattan, where he returned to his first love, drawing and painting, and opened an art gallery.

This conventional, stiff carte de visite portrait of a gentleman identified as “Mr. Packard, school teacher in Liberty Md.,” is decidedly journeyman’s work. The stereotypical props of 1860s card portraits are all there: the chair and table, drapery, and simple, unembellished background were all standard for the time.

Busey has chosen an awkard pose, not quite bust, not quite full-length, and his use of light and shadow is not as skillful as it would become in his Baltimore work.

The photographer has tried to indicate Packard’s profession by giving him a pen, paper and inkwell, but the subject’s somewhat blank stare robs the pose of naturalness.

So who was “Mr. Packard”? There was a Benjamin F. Packard born 1826 in New York, living in Fredericktown in 1850, occcupation school teacher, who fits the bill. Liberty was in Frederick County.

In 1910, a Benjamin Packard lived with his sister Helen (1829-1908) and brother-in-law, writer, attorney and judge John Gibson (1829-1890). Gibson was the author/editor of an oft-referenced 1886 History of York County, Pennsylvania.

The Gibsons and Benjamin F. Packard (1836-1905) are buried in Prospect Hill Cemetery, York, Penn.

Charles P. Lusby, Tintype Photogapher

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Charles P. Lusby operated a photography studio at 127 West Baltimore Street from 1872 to 1875. (The block between South and Calvert streets became East Baltimore Street after street renumbering in 1887.)

This perfectly conventional tintype, composed in the style of cartes de visite of the 1870s–fake pillar, now with one of the new painted backgrounds–reflects the vast output of photographs during the Civil War and post-bellum period.

Tintypes (actually black or chocolate brown japanned iron), invented in the U.S. in the 1850s,  became popular during the Civil War as a more durable and cheaper alternative to the ambrotype and card photograph. Special cameras with from four to 36 apertures made it possible to make multiple exposures simultaneously on a single plate.

“The card photograph,” says photography historian Robert Taft, “was the favorite form of photograph for the soldier boy to leave with his family when he departed for camp.”

But “the boy in camp found that these tintypes would stand the vicissitudes of the army mail service far better than card photographs or ambrotypes” (Taft, Photography and the American Scene, 159).

After the war, says Taft, “A class of operators grew up who developed galleries which made the tintype their specialty” (163).

Born near Chesetertown, Kent County in 1843 to farmer Charles Thomas Lusby and Mary Araminta Boyer Lusby, Charles Lusby  killed himself in the home of his brother-in-law, S. Rowe Burnett,  in May 1889.

The article published in the SUN says that although successful in his business, Lusby had been sick and depressed. He left a wife and three children.

Lusby first came to my attention as part of my research into the Summers-Gaither family album. The album includes a portrait of Allen Lusby. Although several Lusbys appear in the Summers-Gaither family tree, it’s not yet clear how the Lusbys are connected to them.

Mrs. Ida Mathis Johnson of Cumberland, Maryland

This portrait of Ida Mathis Johnson, wife of  Cumberland, Md. physician Dr. James Thomas Johnson (see previous post) was taken at a Towles Studio. Brothers Clarence O. and William H. Towles owned two studios, one in Frostburg and one in Cumberland, ca. 1899-1901; they both had moved to Washington, DC ca. 1910.

According to a 1923 biographical sketch of Dr. James T. Johnson, the couple married in 1896. While the sketch gives her home at the time as Philadelphia, census and passport records indicate Ida, or “Lidie,” Mathis, was born 24 August 1872 in Tuckerton, Burlington County, New Jersey, to farmer Shreve B. Mathis and Elizabeth King Mathis.

Before her marriage, Ida Mathis was superintendent of Western Maryland Hospital, an impressive job for a woman in 1895 (Directory of Cumberland and Allegany County 1895-1896). Her work explains how she must have met her future husband. Mathis graduated from the nursing school at the University of Pennsylvania Hospital, Philadelphia, in 1891 (American Journal of Nursing, v. 10, 1910)—at the time, one of the most highly respected nurse training centers in the country.

The Mathis family history is well-documented by Joyce Kintzel. The family traced its descent from Welsh immigrant John Mathews and Quaker Alice Andrews. Based in Bass River, “Great” John Mathis became one of the dominant landowners and businessmen in southern new Jersey, believed to have owned about 5,000 acres there by the American Revolution. The Mathis family burial ground in Chestnut Neck, New Jersey, as well as Greenwood Cemetery and the Friends burial ground, hold the remains of  family members.

Ida’s distinctive hairstyle helps date her portrait. According to Joan Severa’s Dressed for the Photographer, This top-knot style was fashionable for a short time ca. 1896. The sleeve style also aids in dating: A sleeve with unsupported shoulder puff atop a tight lower arm followed the “collapse” of the exaggerated, broad leg o’mutton sleeve of the mid 90s. I’m going to take a stab at a guess of ca. 1896-1898 for a portrait date.

She holds the tip of her feather or fur boa in her left hand, perhaps to bring attention to an engagement ring.

Dr. James Thomas Johnson of Cumberland, Maryland

An unidentified photographer took this ca. 1900 portrait of Dr. James Thomas Johnson, Sr. (1869-1938).

According to a fawning 1923 biographical sketch in Distinguished Citizens of Allegany County, Johnson was born in Florence, Lauderdale County, Alabama to farmer Thomas Johnson (b. abt. 1812, North Carolina).

After attending the State Normal School in Florence, young Johnson studied medicine at New York University for two years, then continued at the University of Maryland. Johnson graduated from that institution in 1892, did a year of post-graduate work there, and practiced in Baltimore until 1894, when he came to Cumberland and opened up a practice.

A news item says he was named chief physician at Western Maryland Hospital there in 1893, but neither his biography nor his brief obituary mention this.

He married a Miss Ida Mathis in 1896, and they had three children: James Thomas Johnson Jr., Elizabeth Olga Johnson, and William R. Johnson.

By 1920, Johnson was prosperous enough to live in a large house on Washington Street, probably in what is now the Washington Street Historic District, near Prospect Square, and to employ three servants. Johnson sent all three of his children to college, including Elizabeth, who attended Goucher College in Baltimore.

Elizabeth traveled to Europe in 1923, and listed her address as 24 Washington Street, Cumberland, near Emmanuel Episcopal Church. Other documents give their address as 31 Washington Street. Whatever the number, this area near Prospect Square was one of the best neighborhoods in Cumberland.

Johnson may have become prosperous not just through his medical and surgical practice. In 1903, he entered into a partnership with the new owner of the Wills Mountain Inn. They turned the old inn  into the Wills Mountain Sanatorium–a posh convalescent home. The structure burned down in 1930.

Dr. Oleriannus Alvin Cover in Baltimore

This cabinet card portrait of Iowa physician Oleriannus Alvin Cover was likely taken ca. 1893, while Cover was attending the Baltimore Medical College, from which he graduated that year.

A biographical sketch tells us that after taking an MD from Baltimore Medical College, Cover  went to Philadelphia for further study at Jefferson Medical College, so his sojourn in Baltimore was probably relatively brief.

The man with the very unusual name of Oleriannus was born in Union County, Illinois in 1862 to Frederick County, Maryland-born farmer and devout Methodist Abraham Cover and Sophia Miller Cover.

Cover came to the medical profession relatively late in life. After graduating from Southern Illinois Normal School, he taught school and served as a principal at Alto Pass High School in southern Illinois for ten years.

He began studying medicine in 1891, at the Keokuk College of Physicians and Surgeons. After several apprenticeships and MD degrees from both Baltimore Medical College and Jefferson Medical College, Cover settled down to practice in Seymour, Iowa, a small coal town in Wayne County that owed its existence primarily to its proximity to the railroad.

Cover participated enthusiastically in the political and social life of the town: He was an active Mason, Odd Fellow, and a fervent Republican.

Dr. Cover married Jessie Llewellyn of Seymour in 1898 and they had a son, William Llewellyn Cover, in 1908.  Dr. Cover died in a train accident in Rock Island, Illinois in 1916, and was buried in South Lawn Cemetery, Seymour.

After Dr. Cover’s death, Jesse and their son William moved to Los Angeles, to live with Jessie’s brother. William died in San Bernardino, California in 1993.

I suspect that the “Rogers” in this studio partnership was Albert L. Rogers, who briefly occupied the same studio location, 112 N. Charles Street, under his own name, A. L. Rogers, ca. 1891.

Captain John Bond Winslow of Cumberland

John Bond Winslow (b. abt. 1839, New Jersey) perches, to ludicrous effect, on a “pile” of ca. 1870s faux rocks in the Cumberland, Maryland photographic studio of F. G. Wilhelmi.

The incongruous sylvan staging of this very serious, no-nonsense man demonstrates the decade’s mania for props that simulated the outdoors.

According to Winslow Memorial: Family records of the Winslows and their descendants, Capt. Winslow was the son of Margaret-Emily Sergeant of Morristown, New Jersey, and Vermont merchant John Winslow (1802-1839), who died at sea about the time of  John Bond Winslow’s birth.

John B. Winslow’s grandfather, farmer John Winslow (1767-1852) helped to settle the town of Williston, Vermont and was a deacon of the Congregational Church for over four decades. According to the family history, the Winslows were among the first settlers of Plymouth Massachusetts, and counted Plymouth Colony Governor Edward Winslow among their ancestors.

Emily took her son to live with the boy’s uncle George T. Cobb, in New York and later in Morristown. John B. entered the banking business in Morristown, where he remained until the war.

He served in the Quartermaster’s Corps of the Union Volunteers during the Civil War, and mustered out in 1866 with the rank of captain.

In 1870, he was working as the Hampshire and Baltimore Coal Company’s shipping agent in Cumberland.

According to an 1866 report, the company owned two productive tracts, one in Piedmont, West Virginia, and one 12 miles from Piedmont, at George’s Creek.

The coal was transported by train, and either proceeded by train to Baltimore harbor, or was transferred to a fleet of company-owned C & O Canal boats at Cumberland  (one boat was named the “Capt. J. B. Winslow”), and thence to the north via the inland water route.

Winslow married around 1872, but his young wife, Susan Mary Troxell, died in 1879 at the age of 27. She left him with a small son, Herbert Markley Winslow, who was born about 1873.

According to the Baltimore SUN, Winslow’s life did not end well:

“Information was received here today of the death, in Spring Grove Asylum yesterday, of Capt. J. B. Winslow, formerly of Cumberland, who was taken to the institution a year ago.  The deceased was well known here, having been at one time shipping agent of the Hampshire and Baltimore Coal Company” (5 May 1887).

According to a May 1928 Cumberland Evening Times survey of veterans buried in the vicinity, Winslow is buried in Rose Hill Cemetery, Cumberland.