Sunrise Near Baltimore, August 24 1907

In mid-August, 1907, an unknown photographer named Ferdinand W. Hahn–perhaps an amateur, perhaps a tourist from abroad–took a series of photographs documenting a trip to New York City, Norfolk, Virginia, and Washington, DC.

I came upon the prints on an internet auction site, and I couldn’t resist trying to track Hahn’s holiday.

Each print is dated and its location noted in black ink. The earliest, dated August 15th, 1907 to about August 20th, 1907, were taken at Sea Breeze Beach and Midland Beach on Staten Island, and Coney Island.

As the days of late August go by, there are photos of the North German Lloyd ocean liner Kronprinzessin Cecilie docked at Hoboken, New Jersey; Manhattan, the Brooklyn Bridge and New York harbor; battleships off Hampton Roads, Virginia; snaps of the Jamestown Exposition at Hampton Roads, and finally Washington, DC.

There the series ends.

I suspected Hahn was a passenger on the Kronzprinzessin Cecilie, but no one of that name is listed as a passenger of that ship when it arrived in New York on August 14, 1907.

Most are fairly commonplace vacation snaps. This one, along with another of the bay off Norfolk, stood out from the others.

I am not enough of a technician to confirm that it is a silver gelatin print. I only know that the rich warmth of color, the deeply shadowed sails outlined against the sky, the meandering track of the boat’s reflection in on the water’s surface, leave me breathless with  hushed anticipation of a Chesapeake Bay dawn.

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

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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

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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.

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.

Graduates of the Western Maryland Hospital Nurses’ Training School, 1911

It’s battered, worn, chipped and torn, but someone once cared enough for this photograph to identify each of these young 1911 graduates of Western Maryland Hospital’s Nurses’ Training School:

Front row (seated), left to right: Carrie Drucilla Wagner, Ada Brotemarkle, Mary McNeill Williams

Standing, left to right: Margaret E. Conroy, Mary Ward Stevenson

The Baltimore Sun printed a small announcement of the event:

Cumberland, Md., May 18–The graduating exercises of the nurses’ training school of the Western Maryland Hospital will take place at Emmanuel Parish House, Monday evening, May 22. The graduates will be Misses Mary McNeill Williams, Moorefield, W. Va.; Carrie Drucilla Wagner, Hyndman, Pa.; Ada Brotemarkle, near Cumberland; Miss Mary Ward Stevenson, Keyser, W. Va., and Miss Margaret Conroy, Mount Savage, Md.

I have only been able to trace a few fragments of their lives.

Carrie Drucilla Wagner (Carrie was short for Catherine, not Caroline), born April 1890, was the daughter of Hyndman, Pa. coal miner and grocer John H. Wagner and his wife Amanda.

Ada Brotemarkle came from an old Bedford County family.  Her great-great-grandfather, Friedrich Christoph Brodmerkel, was born in Germany in 1745 and died in Cumberland County, Md. in 1823. Ada was the daughter of Bedford County farmers Milton Brotemarkle (1854-1916) and Mary Eliza Anderson Brotemarkle (1851-1907). They are buried in in the cemetery attached to Centenary United Methodist Church, in Alleghany County, Md.

Ada married North Carolinian John Henry Johnson in 1918. They lived first Edgecombe County, North Carolina, where their two children were born: Nellie Johnson (abt. 1922) and David Milton Johnson (b.24 July 1923). In 1930, they had returned to Alleghany County, Md., where they lived in in Wills Creek. John was working as a quarry laborer.

Mary McNeill Williams (b. Apr 1885, Hardy Co., W. Va.) was the daughter of farmer Edward Williams (1831-1902) and Anna Elizabeth Van Meter Williams (1853-1929); both her parents are buried in Olivet Cemetery, Moorefield, Hardy Co., W. Va. In 1930, Mary was living at home with her parents in Moorefield, and working as a private nurse. Her father may have served with the Confederate army during the Civil War.

Margaret E. Conroy (b. Sep 1876) of Mount Savage, Allegheny Co. Md., may have been daughter of Irish immigrant miner Timothy Conroy (b. Feb 1828). In 1920 Margaret worked as nurse in Frostburg, Maryland’s hospital.

The building on Baltimore Avenue these women trained in was dedicated in 1892. It seems likely this photograph was taken on the hospital’s grounds.

Thanks to Jill Craig of the Western Maryland Regional Library for pointing out that Maryland’s county is spelled “Allegany,” not “Allegheny.” The WMRL has agreed to accept the original of this photograph into its photographic collection.

Thanks to Dave Tabler of the cool site ApplachianHistory.net for his help and interest in this photograph.

The Two Mrs. Alexander Chaplains: Emily Thomas

My last post concerned a portrait of Elmira or Elma Kemp Chaplain (1837-1869), first wife of Talbot County Superintendent of Schools Alexander Chaplain (1835-1918).

A short time after I acquired that portrait, I had the very good fortune to find a portrait of Chaplain’s second wife, Emily, also called Emma, Thomas (1838-1904), in an old album of Maryland portraits.  On the back is written “Aunt Emily Chaplain, Uncle Alex’s 2nd wife.”

Emily Thomas, daughter of Dorchester County farmer Algernon Thomas and Deborah Shannahan, married Alexander Chaplain in 1872.  In 1880, Emily bore a half-sister, Eleanor Chaplain,  for her husband’s daughter Maude.

This  carte de visite portrait was made at the studio of Frank Kuhn, in Baltimore. According to Kelbaugh’s Directory of Maryland Photographers, Kuhn , who also partnered for a time with James Cummins, occupied 48 and 50 N. Charles Street 1879-1880. Note that Kuhn identifies himself not as a photographer, but as an” artist.”

Emily sports a long curl worn over one shoulder, a style typical of the 1870s, and possibly made of false hair.

Other surnames found in this album of mostly western Maryland portraits are Spalding, Bourne, Bowers, Willis and Martin. The presence of one Chaplain, referred to as the wife of an “uncle,” and another of Margie Robinson, one of Alexander Chaplain’s nieces (see previous posts under “Chaplain Family”), sent me on a frustrating search for family connections that remains full of unsolved puzzles.