Joe Hammersla and the Pryor Boys, King Studio, Hagerstown

This cabinet card photograph of a group of men drew me with its appealing sense of playful, relaxed spontaneity and emotional expressiveness, rare qualities in nineteenth century photographs.

Taken at the studio of William Brown King in Hagerstown, Maryland, this portrait also attracted me because of the identifications on the back: Scott Pryor, James Pryor, Clinton Draper, John Pryor, and, mysteriously, the name “Hammerslea.”

Kelbaugh’s Directory of Maryland Photographers 1839-1900 dates King photos marked 46 & 48 W. Washington Street, Hagerstown, to the period 1891-1901. This gave me a rough way to gauge the birth dates of the men. The younger men had to be in their early to mid-twenties, so they would have been born in the 1860s-1870s, and the elderly central figure couldn’t have been born much later than  the 1840s.

So, off to ancestry.com I went to start researching possible candidates. I ended up creating a tree for the Pryor family, eventually focusing on the descendants of Jacob Pryor (1805-1889), a Frederick County farm laborer and stave-maker.

His son, John Emmanuel Pryor, had in turn three sons who are good candidates for the three young Pryors in this photo.

John Emmanuel Pryor was a shoemaker who lived in the Hauvers district of Frederick County, Md. His sons, Millard Scott Pryor (1860-1937), John Tracy Pryor (1862-1944), and James Albert Pryor (1872-1919), fit the bill.

Millard, who sometimes went by Scott M. Pryor, married Carrie Redman, and worked as a laborer in the Catoctin district of Frederick County. He eventually got work as a track sweeper, but on these modest means raised seven children.

Brother John Tracy Pryor scraped by as a day laborer. He lost his wife, Alice Swope, before 1900 and was left with two children, romantically named Commodore Perry Pryor and Beatrice Pryor. No doubt John’s mother, with whom they lived, helped to raise them. Their situation improved after 1920: He owned his own farm, and his son Commodore Perry had a good job as a mail carrier.

James Albert Pryor, who worked as a molder in a machine shop, raised six children on Ringgold Road with his wife Carrie Winters Pryor.

Young Clinton Albert Draper (1872-1960) related via marriage to the Pryors via his aunt Urillia E. Draper’s marriage to Robert E. Pryor, turned out to be the adventurer of the group: With his wife, Irene Toms Draper, he lived in Iowa and North Dakota before emigrating to Saskatchewan, Canada in 1916 with their three children, Franklin, Emeline, and John.

Clinton Albert Draper appears on Canadian voter lists as a farmer in Weyburn, Saskatchewan, in 1935 and 1945, and then in Midale, Saskatchewan in the 1950s; he died in Midale, and may be buried there.

But the star of the show is clearly Joseph Absalom Hammersla (1832-1912). Looking away to the left of the camera, he relaxes in the center of all this crowding, boyish energy like a man who knows where he belongs in the world and rests content.

I’m confident in my identification because another researcher on ancestry.com posted a different portrait that matches mine unmistakably.

A prosperous miller, he was born in Frederick, Maryland and died in Berkeley County, West Virginia. During the Civil War, he served on the Union side with the 1st Maryland Cavalry Potomac Home Brigade. According to an article on old mills in the Martinsburg, West Virginia Journal, Joseph Hammersla bought the Eversole mill on Tullis’s Branch in 1891, and descendants operated it to grind grain and cut lumber into the 1920s.

I also found an advertisement in the Hagerstown, Md. Herald and Torchlight for “Old Uncle Joe Hammersla’s Saloon,” dated 27 September 1876. The saloon offered “frogs, pigs feet, tripe,” and “Genuine Milwaukee Lager,” among other delights, “under the Lyceum,” a lecture and performance hall located near the Washington County Courthouse on West Washington Street.

He was appointed postmaster of Littletown, Berkeley County, West Virginia in 1895. He and his  second wife Indiana Morris Hammersla (1848-1929) are buried in Rose Hill Cemetery, Hagerstown, Md.

Hammersla moved to Hedgesville, Berkeley County, West Virginia, between 1870 and 1880, so this photograph may have been taken on a visit back to Hagerstown.

My authority on the life and career of William Brown King is Stephen Recker, author of Rare Images of Antietam and the Photographers Who Took Them.

Brown trained in the Baltimore studio of James S. Cummins. Brown came to Hagerstown with his wife, Lelia Hall King, and their son William F. King, in the late 1880s.

Both King and his wife had fathers who’d served in the Civil War: King’s on the Union side and Hall’s on the Confederate.  King’s father, Robert G. King (1834-1886), was a major in Co. C, Purnell’s Legion, Maryland Infantry. Lelia’s father, James Reid Hall (1830-1904), was a sergeant with Co. A, 40th Virginia Infantry. The two had faced each other in some of the same battles, including the Seige of Petersburg.

All of the subjects in King’s portrait are dressed in rough work clothes and scuffed boots, perhaps reflecting the spontaneous nature of the photograph. They lean together and on one another, affectionate and informal and filled with life. While we may never know what brought these five men together on that day, we still feel the glow of their vigorous humanity.

Looking a Maryland Confederate in the Face: D. W. Culpepper Tintype of Charles Harvey Stanley

If the image on this tintype is, as I think possible, Charles Harvey Stanley (1842-1913), then the operator at D. W. Culpepper’s gallery captured the 24-year-old not long after he mustered out of the Confederate army, ca. 1866.

Ross Kelbaugh’s Directory of Maryland Photographers 1839-1900 lists D. W. Culpepper as occupying 127 W. Baltimore Street from 1866-1868. Culpepper has included “Successor to Leach’s” on the back, which helps confirm the date; William Leach occupied that address ca. 1863-1865. He may have bought back the gallery from Culpepper, because Leach again occupied 127 W. Baltimore Street 1868-1870.

If you look at the two other photographs of Charles H. Stanley that are accessible on the web, his distinctive hairline is the same, but on the opposite side. The technology of tintype photography explains this: Tintypes turned a negative image into a positive, so the image is reversed left to right.

One can trace a few faint lines of penciled signature behind the ink. The ink signature is not identical to the one he provided for his portrait and biographical sketch in volume one of 1907’s Men of Mark of Maryland, but there are similarities. If this portrait was a gift to his younger sister Eliza Stanley (1850-1928) she may have inked over the original pencil inscription.

Born in Saybrook, Connecticut but raised in St. Mary’s County and Laurel, Prince George’s County, Maryland, Charles was the son of an outspoken southern sympathizer, Rev. Harvey Stanley (1809-1885). Stanley was rector of Laurel’s Holy Trinity Episcopal Church from 1851 until his death.

During the run-up to the Civil War, Prince George’s County had the highest population of enslaved African-Americans in the state, and much of the white population identified with the Confederacy.

So, clearly, did Charles Stanley. In 1862, he traveled to Virginia to enlist  in the Confederate forces. He joined Company B of the First Maryland Cavalry Regiment and served until the southern forces surrendered in 1865.

By all accounts, Charles Stanley integrated easily and successfully into post-war Prince George’s County life. He studied law,  developed a prosperous practice, and became involved in many of the civic institutions of the county and the state. He was deeply interested in education, and was president of the Prince George’s County Board of School Commissioners as well as a trustee of the Maryland Agricultural College.

During his long career he was also elected to the Maryland House of Delegates, served as mayor of Laurel and as Comptroller for the State of Maryland under Governor Austin L. Crothers.

Both of Charles Stanley’s wives came from southern planter families with deep Maryland roots. Ella Lee Hodges (1844-1881) descended through her mother from some of the founders of Anne Arundel County.   His second wife, Margaret Snowden (1858-1916), was descended from one of the earliest settlers and largest landowners in Maryland, Richard Snowden.

Raised in Maryland’s plantation/slave economy, Charles fought for that way of life and married into it. He and his second wife, Margaret (Snowden) Stanley are buried at Ivy Hill Cemetery, Laurel, Md., in the heart of a region that today, ironically, boasts  the  most highly educated and “wealthiest African American-majority county in the United States.“

Hannah and Her Sister: Gem Tintype of Christiana Schaeffer Warehime and Hannah Schaffer Leister

This gem-size tintype of Hannah Shaeffer Leister  (1803-1867) and Christiana Schaeffer Warehime (1798-1863) of Carroll County, Maryland had to have been taken in 1863, when the Wing gem tintype camera was invented, because Christiana died in 1863.

Gem tintypes were the most inexpensive way to get many copies of a likeness at once. The camera had 16 lenses, which exposed 16 images, each the size of a postage stamp, onto an iron plate. These were mounted between two pieces of paper or cardboard. The scoring at the top of the card mount may indicate where the mounted images were divided.

Photographers often used tinting to add warmth and life to the dark images, such as has been applied to the cheeks of the sisters here.

Westminster and environs were populous enough to support at least one photography studio. During this period, according to Carroll County photo historian Bob Porterfield, Henry B. Grammer  kept a studio at “the Point,” where Pennsylvania meets West Main Street (Photographers & Photographs of Carroll County 1840-1940, Hampstead, Md., 2004)

Judging from the number of family trees on ancestry.com that include Hannah and Christiana Schaeffer, there seems to be wide interest from descendants. But many of them lead back to the same source, a mysterious 1999 file called PAUL.FTW.

One important source may be a 2000 family history called Descendants of Johann Diel Bohne by Mary Frances Conner Williams, Jennie Gunderson Board, accessible only in a handful of libraries across the country and probably at the Historical Society of Carroll County.

From what I’ve been able to glimpse of this book on the web, Hannah and Christiana were the children of John Jacob Schaeffer (1755-1828) and Anna Maria Pouder. Both Hannah and Christiana married Westminster-area farmers: Hannah to David Leister (1790-1868), and Christiana (also known as Anna or Christina) to George Warehime (1790-1880).

The best evidence I’ve located are the many carefully documented graves in Carroll County cemeteries. John and Anna Maria Schaeffer, along with Hannah Schaeffer Leister and many others, are buried in Kriders Lutheran Church Cemetery near Westminster, Maryland.

Christiana Schaeffer Warehime and many other Warhimes are buried in Jerusalem Lutheran Church Cemetery, Bachman Valley, Carroll County, Maryland.

Hannah and Christiana dressed alike and have arranged their hair alike as well. Only slight differences in the style of buttons and the patterns of their white linen collars distinguish their costumes. But what draws the viewer is the way the sisters lean into one another, a posture that expresses the affection that led them to have their portrait taken not with their husbands or children, but together, as sisters.

Field Trip to Philadelphia: Florence Fisher Webb West

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On first reacquainting myself with Baltimore and environs some years ago, one thing that impressed me was the refreshingly utilitarian method of naming roads. Near my grandparents’ and great-grandparents’ homes runs Philadelphia Road, which I prefer to call “the” Philadelphia Road–because that’s exactly what it was–the road to Philadelphia.

Recently I found myself  taking a metaphorical trip up the Philadelphia Road to explore the family ties of Mrs. Florence Fisher Webb West. After acquiring  a cabinet card identified as Mrs. Frank West by the Russell & Co. studio, No. 5 North Charles Street, Baltimore, I became increasingly interested in a collection of related family photos, mostly taken in Philadelphia.

Florence Fisher Webb was born in Philadelphia about 1871 to bookkeeper Samuel Webb (1842-1932) and Maria Christiana (Dunnott) Webb (1845-1928). Florence spent at least part of her childhood in the Philadelphia household of her aunt and uncle, Eliza Dunnott Gibson and bookbinder George Gibson.

Florence’s middle name honors her maternal grandmother, Elizabeth Fisher Dunott (1824-1897). The Dunott family appears to have originated in Delaware, while the Webbs go far back in Philadelphia. Florence’s grandfather, John Webb, went to sea as a youth, served with the city militia during the nativist riots of 1844, and prospered as a hotel owner.

Florence married hardware salesman Frank West in 1897, son of Emma and Edwin West (1844-1909), an English-born bank clerk. Florence and Frank had one child, Jack Edwin West, born in 1899. Frank does not appear to have done particularly well financially. At first they lived with her parents at 1706 N. Sydenham Street, a neighborhood of three-story, two-bay Italianate row houses near what is now Temple University. In 1910 he gave his occupation as manufacturer of garters. In 1920 he was a “sanitary engineer” at an ordnance depot in Salem County, New Jersey.

1930 found Florence a widow. She and her son were again living with her parents on Sydenham Street in Philadelphia. After that, the trail goes cold. I know she was alive in 1932, because I found a record of invoices sent to her for the funeral and grave for her father with that date, addressed to her at 1706 N. Sydenham Street. That is the last trace of Florence Fisher Webb West.

Her son Jack lived alone in 1940, and gave his occupation at salesman in a sporting goods store. I learned that he served in the Army during World War II, but not what became of him afterwards.

I have another Russell & Co. portrait of Florence’s mother Maria, possibly taken during the same period. But what drew them to Baltimore? I still don’t know.

Hubert Slifer Smith at Work and Leisure

It’s unusual to find two photographs of the same individual–and even more unusual to find an “occupational” photo. So I was very excited when I found these two for sale, both idenfied in ink on the reverse as “Hubert Smith.”

The first, taken at Academy Studio, Cumberland, Maryland, shows Hubert dressed as a baker, holding one of the implements of his trade.

It wasn’t hard to locate a Hubert Slifer Smith (1885-1949) occupation baker, in the census records for Cumberland.

Born in Boonsboro, Washington County, Maryland to Omar S. Smith and Emma F. Houpt, Hubert Smith (1885-1949) married Scottish immigrant Elizabeth Walker. He and Elizabeth lived in Cumberland, where Hubert worked as a baker.

In 1917, when he registered for the draft, he was working for John M. Streett.

Streett had two bakeries, one in Frostburg, and one in Cumberland, at 80 Centre Street and later at 200-204 Centre Street. I’ve found adversisements in trade publications for Streett’s Famous Mother’s Bread; he also called his business Pure Food Bakery. An undated photograph in the Herman and Stacia Miller Collection shows Streett’s bakery with the proprietor and his workers standing out front.

Streett boasted about the cleanliness of his establishment, a feature dwelt upon in the Baker’s Review of 1915. “Leading grocers throughout Cumberland and ‘up the creek’ sell and recommend Streett’s Mother’s Bread,” said an ad in The Catholic Red Book of Western Maryland.

In the first photo, the skinny, slope-shouldered youth, almost lost in his uniform, wears an elaborate ribbon on his gleaming white shirt, but I haven’t been able to make out what it says. My best guess for the occasion of the portrait is one of Cumberland’s Labor Day parades, in which groups of tradesmen and craftsmen marched, dressed in the uniforms of their occupations.

The elaborate pin with a ribbon and badge resembles  old lodge badges of the Knights of Pythias and the Independent Order of Odd Fellows that I’ve seen.

Confident manhood replaces callow youth in the portrait of Hubert Smith taken at the McCune Studio in Hagerstown, Maryland. Smith proudly shows off his dress clothes, including a top coat, gloves, and a natty homberg hat.

The McCune Studio, like the Academy Studio, isn’t listed in Kelbaugh’s Directory of Maryland Photographers 1839-1900. But Charles Brewer McCune (1869-1953) is memorialized on findagrave.com with his obituary and a photograph of his grave at Rose Hill Cemetery, Hagerstown. According to that obituary, McCune practiced professional photography in Hagerstown for 35 years.

Both of these cabinet cards are non-standard sizes. The earlier card  mount measures 3″ x 6″  and the later McCune card is 5″ x 8″ –perhaps chosen to emphasize his lanky build. Both mounts, with their neutral colors and understated blind-embossed advertising marks reflect the more refined card portrait style of the early 1900s.

The Smiths’ lives were marked by the singular tragedy of deaths of their only child and grandchild.

Doris E. Smith (b. 1909, Cumberland, Md.) married handsome US Naval Academy graduate Robert Allen Joseph English (1899-1969), and they had a daughter, Roberta, in 1943.

Three years later, with her husband in Europe on extended duty with General Eisenhower’s staff, Doris killed herself and her daughter using gas from the oven in their Arlington, Virginia home.

“With humor and distinction”: Judge John Hunt Hendrickson

Young John Hunt Hendrickson (1887-1951) had this portrait taken while at school at Western Maryland College, in Westminster, Carroll Co. Md.

The operator at Sereck Shalecross Wilson’s (1870-1943) Westminster studio placed the solemn youth against a soft background and lit him from the right to throw his long, straight nose, clear pale skin and wide, expressive mouth into relief.

The reverse of the cream card mount with blind embossed lion advertising mark bears an inscription and the year 1907, making Hendrickson about 20 at the time of this photograph.

The understated background and restrained, oversized card mount reflect the period’s move away from the visual excesses of the 1880s and 1890s. Wilson  took many photographs for Western Maryland College year books; examples can be found in the digital archives of Western Maryland College. The Carroll County Times also has a few of his portraits on its website.

Hendrickson earned a BA and was class valedictorian, speaking on “Reason in Leadership.”

After graduation, his father, John David Hendreickson, prosperous owner of The Model, a dry goods store in Frederick, sent him to Harvard Law School.

At Harvard, he told a Portland, Oregon reporter in 1947, not knowing where he would end up locating, he took very little law, and soaked up all the operas,  plays, lectures and concerts that he could.

With a poor showing at law school, Hendrickson decided to go  west. He went to Portland, Oregon, where his first job was with the firm Veazie & Veazie, run by Oregon natives Arthur Lyle Veazie (1868-1941) and J. Clarence Veazie, whose forebears, the Lyles, Scotts and Veazies, and settled in Oregon in the 1840s, ’50s and ’60s.

Hendrickson had deep roots in Frederick County, Maryland. His great-grandfather, weaver and farmer John Hendrickson (1801-1982), was born in the Johnsville district of that county.

One strong thread of the family’s story is the move from country to town, from farm labor to store owner to educated professional.

Judge Hendrickson’s father was brought up to hard farm work, but left that life to become a clerk in a store at the age of 16.

Then, after having bought the store and made it one of the most successful in Frederick, J. D. Hendrickson sent two of his three  sons to college and took the third, Russell Ames Hendrickson (1891-1968), into his business.

J. D. Hendrickson’s  third son, Caroll Henshaw Hendrickson (1892-1971), attended Cornell University and ultimately joined his brother Russell in the family firm.

In Portland, John Hunt Hendrickson found his calling as a legal educator and a judge. He began teaching commercial law  to bankers in 1913, then became an instructor and eventually dean of Northwestern College of Law until 1943. He was elected a district court judge in 1926 and held that position with the high respect of his peers until, wheelchair-bound from multiple schlerosis, he retired from the bench in 1947.

The circa 1820 brick and stone home where he grew up, at 119 West Second Street, in Frederick, still stands, as does the building where his father and then his brothers operated what became Hendrickson’s Department Store until the 1970s.

Judge Hendrickson died on 28 June 1951. He is most likely entombed with his wife, Winifred Birrell Hendrickson, at Riverview Abbey Mausoleum and Crematory, Portland, Oregon.

The home where they brought up their two sons, Ames Birrell Hendrickson and John H. Hendrickson Jr., stands very much the same at 2821 South West Upper Drive.

The Frederick County Historical Society has a number of early Hendrickson family photos on display on its website.

Sources:

Bypath Biographies: J. Hunt Hendrickson, by Elizabeth Salway Ryan, Portland Oregonian, 22 June 1947

History of Frederick County, Maryland, Volume One, by Thomas John Chew Williams and Folger McKinsey, originally published in Frederick, Maryland, 1910

Commencements 1901-1920, McDaniel College Digital Archives

The Strange Case of James Burnite SeBastian, DDS

Without the full story, you have to read between the lines, and this cabinet card photograph inscribed “Yours, J. B. SeBastian” offered lots of room to do just that.

The portrait, taken at the 17 W. Lexington Street studio of William Ashman (1863-1902), displays all the typical characteristics of a post-1900 card photograph: Oversized, simple black textured mount, understated advertising mark, plain background uncluttered by scenic backdrop or papier mache rocks and balustrades.

It didn’t take me long to figure out that I’d found yet another graduate of the University of Maryland Dental Department.

He was listed among the 1902 graduates of the program in the commencement announcement published in the journal Dental Cosmos. I quickly found census and directory listings in Baltimore from 1903 on for a James Burnite Sebastian, dentist, born in Delaware about 1875.

He had an undistinguished career as a dentist, eventually buying a two-story, two-bay row house at 3521 Greenmount Avenue, just east of Johns Hopkins University’s Homewood campus, in a now-faded neighborhood called Waverly. The ca. 1920 house stands today, virtually unchanged.

Dr. Sebastian served in the US Army Dental Corps Reserves. In these records, his origin was listed as Wilmington, Delaware, born 18 October 1875. His wife, Caroline, applied in 1947 for an Army-provided headstone in Lorraine Park Cemetery, Baltimore, on the basis of his service, using this date of birth.

Things became odder from there, however.

I couldn’t find anything on Dr. Sebastian earlier than 1902.

After trying a number of different possible spellings and variations, I found the surname Bastian. Thanks to the efforts of a family historian on Ancestry.com, I then found an obituary for a Delaware farmer named George M. Bastian (1832-1909) that listed a son, a Baltimore dentist named James Burnite Bastian.

But what the what??

James Burnite Bastian, or J. Burnite Bastian, was already three years old in the 1870 census–not in Wilmington, Delaware, but near a small rural peach-growing and peach-packing town named Felton, in Kent County, Delaware. He was born a good seven or eight years earlier than he’d claimed.

This same portrait, under the name James B. Bastian, appears on page 133 in the 1902 year book for the professional schools of the University of Maryland, Bones, Molars and Briefs.

Why the name change? And why fudge his age–something more usual with women of the period?

His family was a perfectly respectable one: farmer George M. Bastian rated a sketch of his life and family history in volume two of the Biographical and Genealogical History of the State of Delaware.

This history suggested a clue to James’ change of surname. The sketch mentioned that the family traced its roots to a vague “Count Sebastian” who had fled some sort of unspecified royal persecution in the 18th century.

They had settled in Lycoming County, Pennsylvania. George M. Bastian worked as a carpenter in Tioga County, Pa., eventually saving enough to buy a small farm in Delaware, where he and his wife, Rachel (Brion) Bastian (1836-1919), raised 10 children. George and Rachel Bastian are buried in Hopkins Cemetery, Felton, Delaware.

So James had reinvented himself in the city as a younger man with the legendary family surname, telling his classmates that he was 25 when in fact he was about 32 years old at the time he graduated from dental school. His signature on the back of this portrait connects the two parts of the surname with a capital “s” and a capital “b,” suggesting the self-consciousness of the change.

Vanity, thy name is SeBastian.

Rare Images of Antietam and the Photographers Who Took Them

Thanks to a Hagerstown pal, I’ve acquired and am devouring Steve Recker’s wonderful new book Rare Images of Antietam and the Photographers Who Took Them.

A Washington County native, Recker has researched the lives of all the major photographers who took photos of Antietam battlefield: Elias Marken Recher, David Bachrach, W. B. King, J. H. Wagoner, and more.

Recker carefully investigated how each photographer came to take their pictures, and has painstakingly worked to understand what is depicted in each. Also included are some rarely-seen images of the photographers themselves. Some of these cartes de visite and stereoviews have never been seen before.

And you can’t get it on Amazon–only at area bookstores and at Recker’s site, Virtual Antietam. So virtually run, don’t walk, to his site and grab a copy before they sell out.

Read a Q & A with the author on John Banks’ Civil War Blog.

Read an article about Recker and his career in the Hagerstown Daily Mail.

Buffham’s Brice House, Annapolis

This over-sized (8-1/2″x6-1/2″) card photograph by George Richard Buffham (1846-1915) is much larger than today’s tourist mementos, but the photo of the Brice House on East Street, entitled “Colonial Annapolis,”  seems meant for a tourist market.

English-born George Buffham moved to Annapolis from Baltimore and operated a photographic studio at 48 Maryland Avenue there from the 1890s to about 1910. He held an appointment as official photographer to the US Naval Academy between 1890 and 1900; in 1912 he sold his studio and retired with his wife, Ethel, to their home outside the town.

Buffham photographed several well-known graduates of the Naval Academy, including Chester W. Nimitz. Some of Buffham’s portraits can be found in the Maryland State Archives and the Library of Congress.

Buffham also operated a photographic studio at the Bay Ridge Resort, a popular summer hotel and amusement park now an exclusive enclave of homes just south of town that is fiercely protective of its heritage, wildlife, open space and community traditions.

George and Ethel (Hubbard) Buffham’s red-roofed home, built in 1891, still stands at 11 Barry Avenue in Bay Ridge. Unfortunately, a 1915 fire that destroyed Bay Ridge’s hotel also destroyed Buffham’s large collection of photographic plates.

This is the first example of one of Buffham’s tourist-market photographs that I’ve seen come up for sale. It depicts one of the oldest and best-known Georgian homes in Annapolis, the James Brice House on East Street. Begun by Annapolis Mayor James Brice, the Brice House was built of brick on a fieldstone foundation 1767-1774, in a five-part form featuring a central structure flanked by two “hyphens.”

The Library of Congress has digitized 15 of its collection of 17 photographs of Brice House’s interior and exterior. The house is now home to the International Masonry Institute’s headquarters, and apparently is not open to the public.

The house has figured in recent archeological work in the town.  1998 excavations in the east wing uncovered African-American protective Hoodoo caches.

Photographs like this one open a window into the ways that 19th century photographers attempted to expand their products beyond portraiture by capitalizing on Americans’ revived interest in their nation’s origins.

Additional Sources:

Jane Wilson McWilliams and Caroline Patterson, Bay Ridge on the Chesapeake: An Illustrated History (Annapolis: Brighton Editions, 1986) Available for purchase from the authors.

“Death Came Softly”: Rev. Cornelius L. Keedy, Hagerstown, Maryland

Those are the first words of the headline on Rev. C. L. Keedy’s obituary in the Hagerstown Daily Mail of 25 March 1911. The paper made much of the gentle manner of Rev. Keedy’s passing. It was what used to be known as a “good death”: peaceful and without suffering.

This notion of the good Christian death was very different from mid-19th century accounts that stressed, says  historian Patricia Jalland, the spiritual nature of suffering and its ability to bring dying sinners to God :

“The ordeal could provide punishment for past sins, while also purifying, testing and strengthening the Christian faith of sufferer and attendants. . .[Christan writers’] emphasis was usually on the spiritual struggle and ultimate triumph rather than the physical ordeal” (Death in the Victorian Family, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996, pp. 51-53)

At the end of the Victorian period, however,”the evangelical model of the good death declined in influence. . . . The decline in Evangelical piety and passion in the late Victorian period was paralleled with an increase in anxiety about the physical suffering of dying” (Death, 53).

Those who mourned Cornelius Keedy, Lutheran minister, physician and long-time president and proprietor of Hagerstown Female Seminary, could take comfort in the ease of his passing.

He had died  “sitting in his natural position when he was in the habit of reading, the paper in his hand, his arm on the table. His features were composed and peaceful, indicating that death was instantaneous, occurring without a struggle or any pain.”

This easy death might be taken as an indication that the longtime Lutheran educator had, in Christian terms, found his heavenly reward for an exemplary life. The obituary writer described him as “widely known” and “prominent in religious and educational circles;” the writer claims that “the news of his death produced a shock throughout the community”–but we really don’t know what kind of a man he was.

Cornelius Keedy (1834-1911) was one of eight children born near Rohrersville, Md. to prosperous Washington County farmers Daniel Keedy (1799-1876) and Sophia (Miller) Keedy (1809-1880). Rev. Keedy graduated from Gettysburg College in 1857 and was ordained as a Lutheran minister in 1859. He  served Lutheran congregations in Johnstown, Waynesboro, and St. Peter’s Lutheran Church in Barren Hill, Pa.

He married Elizabeth Wyatt Marbourg (1840-1920), daughter of successful Johnstown merchant Alexander Marbourg, in 1860.

In 1863 Keedy earned a degree in medicine from the University of Pennsylvania. He practiced, according to his obituary, for about five years in Washington, Iowa, where some of his wife’s relations had settled.

But it was as president and owner of the Hagerstown Female Seminary,  later renamed Kee-Mar College, that Rev. Keedy was chiefly known.

The school, located at E. Antietam and King streets, had been established in 1853 by the Maryland Synod of the Lutheran Church.  Keedy purchased it in 1878, and according to J. Thomas Scharf, “continued to improve it until it has become one of the most beautiful and attractive places in any of the middle states” (J. Thomas Scharf, History of Western Maryland, v. 2, 1882, p. 1159).

“The seminary stands upon a commanding eminence just east of Hagerstown, from which may be had a magnificent view of hill and dale and of the town outstretched below. The main edifice is an imposing brick structure, four stories in height, and built in the Romanesque style. There are three wings of equal height with the main building. The grounds, comprising an area of 11 acres, are thickly set with upwards of one hundred handsome evergreens, and about five hundred trees of other varieties. Choice shrubbery marks in graceful lines numerous picturesque divisions of the inclosoure, and over the entire surface is spread a bright carpet of rich green-sward.”

The school had a fairly serious and  ambitious curriculum for its young women,  including ancient and modern languages, English literature, and music.

Mrs. Keedy served as principal, and she may have also had a considerable financial stake in the school. F. J. Halm published a song entitled “The Hagerstown Female Seminary March,” dedicated to Mrs. Keedy, in 1877.

Hagerstown Female Seminary was created as part of a wave of enthusiasm about women’s education that swept the Lutheran church after David F. Bittle published his 111-page “Plea for Female Education” in 1851 (Richard W. Solberg, Lutheran Higher Education in North America (Minneapolis: Augsburg Publishing House, 1985, p. 102). Rev. Bittle even resigned his pastorate to raise funds and support for the proposed school.

After the college closed in 1911, the buildings were occupied by Washington County Hospital. The structures on the site were demolished in 2012, and the city is currently considering how to use the open space.

This cabinet card photograph, taken at the Hagerstown studio of Bascom W. T. Phreaner (1845-1932) is dated in pen on the reverse “1861-1862,” but Keedy’s white hair and wrinkles suggest a later date. Phreaner maintained a photographic studio in Hagerstown from 1866 to 1901.

For this portrait, the photographer chose a vignetted, head-and-shoulders composition, with the sitter facing a quarter turn away from the camera. The pose created deep shadows above eyes that look slightly upward, as if Keedy were thinking about his many responsibilities: four children to educate and provide for, and a school full of 150 lively adolescent young ladies to watch over.

Rev. Cornelius L. Keedy and Elizabeth Marbourg Keedy are buried in Rose Hill Cemetery, Hagerstown. Their children were Sarah (Keedy) Updegraff, James Marbourg Keedy, Wyatt M. Keedy, and Cornelius King Keedy.

My thanks to the wonderful Washington County Free Library and to the Hagerstown Neighborhood Development Partnership for the research on Hagerstown Female Seminary posted on their blog [re]Develop Hagerstown.