Stereoview of Christ Protestant Episcopal Church

This stereoview of Christ Protestant Episcopal Church, St. Paul and Chase streets, Baltimore, was probably published by William M. Chase in the 1870s. The view looks east from E. Chase Street, toward St. Paul Street.

Christ Church, organized in 1797, was the second Episcopal church in Baltimore. The congregation occupied a variety of locations before the present church building was constructed at a cost of $125,000 (Henry Elliot Shepherd, A History of Baltimore, Maryland, S. B. Nelson publisher, 1898, pp. 217-218).

E. Francis Baldwin and Bruce Price designed the Gothic Revival structure in the Mount Vernon area in 1869, when the new ecclesiastical architectural style was first being introduced into the U.S.  According to The Architecture of Baltimore: A Pictorial History, this particular church’s style was known as French or Norman Gothic:

Its details are elegantly restrained and carried out in rough-faced white marble–narrow lancet windows, carved stone trefoils, pointed-arch doorways and window lintels, stone columns with leafy medieval capitals, and carved stone rosettes. The massing is symmetrical with a tall main tower and secondary smaller towers and spires (199).

This beautiful and historic church structure has been occupied by an independent non-denominational African-American congregation since the mid-1990s. Today the church is called the New Refuge Deliverance Cathedral.

Christ Church is located three blocks directly north of Mount Vernon Place, and is part of a historic neighborhood rich in cultural and architectural landmarks such as the Washington Monument and the Walters Art Gallery.

The fashionable Mount Vernon neighborhood developed in the 1830s in the elegant streets and parks laid out around the Washington Monument by Charles and William Howard on their father’s former estate, Belvidere (Architecture of Baltimore, 118). The area remained the epicenter of wealthy and cultured Baltimore until the late nineteenth century.

View a contemporary photograph of Christ Church taken by the author of the Monument City blog.

A Byerly Beauty

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This ca. 1880s cabinet card portrait was taken by John Davis Byerly (1839-1914) at his studio on Frederick’s Market Street,  founded by his father, Jacob Byerly (1807-1883), in 1842.

John joined his father’s business ca. 1863-1869, during which period their photographs bore the business name J. Byerly & Son.

Around 1869-1870, photographs began bearing the name J. Davis Byerly. In 1899, John retired and turned the business over to his son Charles Byerly (1874-1944), who ran the studio until it was destroyed in a building collapse in 1915.

A number of details, both of setting and of dress, place this photograph in the 1880s.

The advertising that  fills the card’s reverse employs a japonisme decorative motif, with a bamboo frame accented with small blossoms.

The subject’s dress features mid- to late-1880s details such as a high round collar, relatively tight sleeves set high on the shoulder, a bodice decorated with buttons, dark velvet trim and tucks. Her hair is worn pulled back, low on the head, with  curled bangs typical of the decade, as is her small, high-crowned hat, known as a “capote.”

Increasingly, photographers of the late 19th century used props and painted backgrounds to more closely approximate the naturalness of the best painted portraiture. Darrah distinguishes this more elaborate “staging” of a portrait from simple posing (William C. Darrah, Cartes de Visite in Nineteenth Century Photography, 33).

Byerly may have been thinking of M.A. Root’s instructions in The Camera and The Pencil to “place the model in a very easy and graceful manner” (quoted in Darrah, Cartes, ).

Byerly posed his subject in a faux outdoor setting with fake grass, papier mache tree stump, and painted backdrop, as if the young woman were reading outside her home on a fine spring day. The light emanates from the upper right corner of the frame in imitation of natural sunlight.

The photograph’s decorative framing however, cannot compete with the simple, fresh, confident attractions of its young subject.

As usual, the information and interpretations of the portrait above rely on several key sources: Ross Kelbaugh’s Directory of Maryland Photographers 1839-1900, William C. Darrah’s Cartes de Visite in Nineteenth Century Photography, and Joan Severa’s Dressed for the Photographer: Ordinary Americans and Fashion 1840-1900.

Another View of ” ‘Shucking’ Oysters”

One of the most common Baltimore stereoviews I’ve seen, aside from the monuments, is Keystone View Company’s ” ‘Shucking’ Oysters, Oyster House, Baltimore, Md.”

Views like this one were meant both to entertain and inform the armchair tourist. The text on the back of the view offers educational information about the oyster industry in America: how oysters are caught and processed, and the place of the oyster harvest in American fish and seafood production.

This view is a well-known depiction of one kind of working class women’s labor in Baltimore in the early years of the 20th century. While the anonymous writer dismisses shucking as consisting of  “merely of removing the shells,” Paula J. Johnson’s study of work at an oyster house on the Patuxent shows that “of all the tasks involved in the entire oyster house work activity, shucking was the only one requiring  mastery of a complex of technical skills and know-how.”

Yet,  as Johnson documents in “Sloppy Work for Women: Shucking Oysters on the Patuxent,” “historically, shucking oysters was considered a menial, dirty job, typically relegated to the poorest people. In Maryland, this meant immigrants, women, blacks and children” (38).

After 1865, thousands of white women, most of foreign birth, worked as shuckers in Baltimore. As was typical in an oyster house, the women stand in wooden stalls, in a cold, damp building, probably for 12 hours a day, six days a week, for a dollar or two a day, depending on one’s speed and skill.

These women wear rubber aprons, but are using their bare hands to slice open the wet, muddy shells. In order to bring the meat out intact, and thus get the best money, one had to learn how to slice through the muscles of the oyster without cutting the meat.

Once removed, the meats were placed in separate buckets according to size. Empty shells are tossed at their feet for removal. Shuckers brought full buckets to a counter between shucking and packing rooms for rinsing, grading and weighing. Tallies were kept on a chalk board.

Because each oyster is unique, shucking resisted mechanization. No inventor was ever successful in designing a machine that could do what the human shucker could do.

Johnson’s essay can be found in the 1988 volume for which she served as editor: Working the Water: The Commercial Fisheries of Maryland’s Patuxent River (Charlottesville: Calvert Marine Museum and the University Press of Virginia Press).

In addition to several essays, this invaluable book contains photographs of 148 implements and other kinds of equipment used in the Patuxent fisheries, from knives to water craft, as well as numerous images of watermen and others in the industry at work.

Margaret Robinson, Daughter of Sarah Chaplain Robinson

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This carte de visite by Walter J. L. Dyer is another in the group I purchased from the same Talbot County lot of card photographs. It depicts the vignetted  head of Margaret L. “Margie” Robinson, the daughter of Sarah Chaplain (b. abt. 1832, Trappe, Talbot Co., Md.) and James Lowery Robinson (1829-1914).

Sarah Chaplain was one of Dr. James Stevens Chaplain’s siblings (see prior post). The Chaplains traced their ancestry back to Francis Chaplain, who is believed to have arrived in Talbot County about 1660 from Suffolk County, England and settled around a village that became known as Trappe.

Trappe is about nine miles almost due south of Easton on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. The village grew up at the crossroads of two routes, one running north-south between Easton and Cambridge, and the other running east-west. Even though its population never seems to have been much above 400, the town had four churches, three physicians, and several hardware and general stores.

An 1877 map of Trappe shows Dr. James Stevens’ home on the south end of the village, and Mrs. J. L. Robinson’s home near the crossroads.

The vendor who removed this photo from its original album copied the notes he found there onto the back of the carte: “Margaret (Margie) Robinson, Aunt [illegible] daugther, died young” Born about 1863, probably in Baltimore, Margaret may have died between 1870 and 1880 based on her absence from the family in the 1880 census.

The pose chosen by Dyer is quite similar to that used in a carte of Margaret’s sister, Eliza Robinson Lloyd (see previous post): Lit from above , head turned to the right.

According to William Darrah’s Cartes de Visite in Nineteenth Century Photography, the cherubs and camera motif was popular as a back-mark ca. 1866-1874.

During the 1860s and early 1870s, Dyer partnered with the New York-born photographer J. M. Van Wagner at the same address, 468 W. Baltimore Street, in Baltimore. Dyer, son of a Towson grocer, lived with the Van Wagner family in 1870.

At some point during the 1870s, Dyer became sole proprietor of the studio. By 1880, he had given up photography to go into the grocery business.

Ross Kelbaugh

Everything I have learned or will learn about early photography and photographers in Maryland is based on the invaluable work of Ross J. Kelbaugh.

He has been collecting Maryland photographs and researching Maryland photographers for decades. If you want to know anything about early Baltimore and Maryland photographers, if you want to know anything about Maryland photography in the Civil War, or about photography and the Civil War in general, he’s your guy.

I have three of his excellent books so far:

The Civil War in Maryland: An Exhibit of Rare Photographs documents the exhibition Kelbaugh curated at the Maryland Historical Society in 2006.

An Introduction to Civil War Photography is a brief, clearly written, profusely illustrated soft-cover that does exactly what it says.  I’ve read it three times already.

Directory of Maryland Photographers 1839-1900 is the bible for Maryland vintage photo collectors. Kelbaugh painstakingly gathered and collated information about Maryland photographers and studios using a variety of sources. This hard-cover labor of love, which includes reproductions of rare photos from Kelbaugh’s own collection and biographies of some of the most important photographers, is an essential reference work. I read it cover-to-cover as if it were a novel. I refer to it at least once a day.

You can buy Ross Kelbaugh’s books directly from him at his website, HistoricGraphics.com.