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Lens on the Texas Frontier
By Lawrence T. Jones III Texas A&M University Press
Copyright © 2014 Lawrence T. Jones III
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-62349-147-5
CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION
Documenting Texas History
COLLECTORS ARE A STRANGE but driven lot. We are passionate about what we do and tend to think others should feel the same. I hesitate to say "obsessed," but it is not far off the mark in describing hard-core collectors. Since 1976 I have collected, studied, researched, and written about antique American photography. My initial interest was Civil War photographs taken in the southern states of the old Confederacy. For over three decades I researched images and published a calendar featuring Confederate photography. As the years passed, my interest changed somewhat, and I began to focus more on the history (from the 1840s up to 1900) of my home state of Texas. Soon it became obvious to me that early Texas photography should be the focus of my collecting.
Early Texas photographs are extremely rare compared with other geographical regions of the United States. During the 1980s, when I began to focus seriously upon Texas as a collecting theme, I realized that no private individuals were collecting or studying antique Texas photography. This was not a new realization. The lack of interest in historic Texas photography was mentioned in 1941 in The Southwestern Historical Quarterly by Samuel Wood Geiser of Southern Methodist University at Dallas.
In a letter addressed to Walter Prescott Webb, noteworthy Texas historian, and then managing editor of the Quarterly, Geiser mentioned the "splendid history" Robert Taft wrote on the history of photography in America. Geiser bemoaned the fact that Taft's 500-plus-page book contained only a single paragraph devoted to early Texas photography. The obvious conclusion for Geiser was "the need for some thoroughgoing work on the history of photography in early Texas." The professor briefly touched on the identity and work of some of the earliest photographers in Texas, stating that his brief notes might serve as a "starting point" for someone in extending that single, brief paragraph on Texas in Taft's Photography and the American Scene.
No doubt Geiser's comments were of particular interest to Webb, who was married to the daughter of William James Oliphant, a prominent and important nineteenth-century Austin photographer. Oliphant was a Confederate veteran who took up photography as a profession after the American Civil War. He photographed important people and events, and he had also known and studied with two of America's best-known photographers, Alexander Gardner and Timothy O'Sullivan of Washington, DC. Oliphant also was an early collector of photographs, especially those by his friends and associates. Included in his collection are previously unknown and unpublished photographs of his own, O'Sullivan, and other photographers that worked at Gardner's Gallery, such as William R. Pywell. After Oliphant's death Webb and his wife preserved Oliphant's collection of photographs. I like to think that Webb understood the historical value of what he had saved. Years later in a quirk of fate and a stroke of luck, I was able to acquire the bulk of the Oliphant photograph collection from Webb family descendants. This collection now is preserved as a sub-collection in the Lawrence T. Jones III Collection at the DeGolyer Library.
When I became serious about collecting early Texas photography during the 1980s, I found that very little had been written or published about nineteenth-century Texas photography since the Geiser-Webb discussions in 1941. One notable exception was The Diamond Years of Texas Photography, written and published in 1975 by Ava Crofford. However, this book is primarily a history of the Texas Professional Photographers Association from 1898 to 1973, and it contained very little information about what I consider the heyday of early Texas photography, from the 1840s through the 1870s. Another important edition was Catching Shadows: A Directory of Nineteenth-Century Texas Photographers by David Haynes. Published by the Texas State Historical Association in 1993, Haynes's comprehensive work is a checklist of more than twenty-five hundred working photographers in Texas from 1843 to 1900. Haynes provided not only a listing of early Texas photographers in alphabetical order, but he also included known biographical information and dates of operation. His work continues to be an invaluable reference for anyone interested in nineteenth-century Texas photography.
More recently, three award-winning books about nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Texas photography have been published. In 2004 the Texas State Historical Association released Civil War and Revolution on the Rio Grande Frontier: A Narrative and Photographic History by Jerry Thompson and myself. This work visually chronicled the bloody and complicated history of the war-torn border between south Texas and Mexico from 1861 to 1870. In 2005 Stanford University Press published Pioneer Photographers from the Mississippi to the Continental Divide: A Biographical Dictionary 1839–1865 by Peter E. Palmquist and Thomas R. Kailbourn. This essential reference, the second volume in a proposed series, includes biographical entries for over three thousand North American photographers, and Texas is included in this volume. It is well documented, thorough, and provides more information than any other published source about Texas photographers from the 1840s through 1865. In 2009 Texas A&&&;M University Press published Taming the Land: The Lost Postcard Photographs of the Texas High Plains by John Miller Morris. It is the first in a series called Plains of Light that will eventually cover twenty-four county regions of Texas from 1905 to 1920. Morris's pioneering work in the area of real photo postcards has been a significant contribution to the history of photography in Texas.
As I built an historic Texas photographic collection over the past thirty years, it began to be recognized as one of the best of its type in private hands. As a practical matter, my timing was serendipitous. It would be virtually impossible to find and assemble a comparable collection in today's marketplace. Creating this collection has been a slow, time-consuming, often expensive, patience-testing, and sometimes difficult journey. It has also been my privilege to build it. I am grateful to have been able to devote my life to something I feel is so worthwhile and to make my own contribution to Texas history.
Private collectors are temporary custodians of what they collect. Many private collections are assembled after years of work and invariably contain a unique and significant visual history that is worth preserving for future generations. Whereas institutional collections usually remain intact, a private collection can be broken up, re-entering the marketplace and re-forming in other collections. Unfortunately, it is more common for comprehensive private photography collections to be sold and scattered than to remain intact. There are many reasons for this, but they include changing interests over time, simple economic need, or even the death of the collector. Although in such a case the individual photographs still exist, the disintegration of a collection invariably results in the loss of our ability to interpret and understand the history of the photographs as a collection, not to mention the insight and scholarship of the collector himself. I did not want that to happen to my collection. An understanding of its rarity and historic importance, and my emotional investment all played a part in my interest in finding a home for my collection. About 70 percent of the collection comprises unique images, so the thought of disassembling the collection was horrifying. I wanted my collection to remain intact, and it needed to be preserved.
A friend and colleague offered to help. Texas historian and renowned antiquarian bookseller Dorothy Sloan was instrumental in setting up a series of meetings and conversations between Dr. Russell Martin, director of the DeGolyer Library at Southern Methodist University, and me. Soon it became obvious to me that their institution was an ideal repository for the collection. Transferring the Jones collection from my hands to the DeGolyer Library ensures that it will be preserved, well cared for, and available for teaching and research. With the addition of the Jones collection to the DeGolyer Library's already strong holdings of Texas photographs, SMU is now the custodian of one of the world's best institutional collections of Texas photography. I hope that the collection I assembled is just a beginning response to SMU Professor Geiser's call in 1941 for "the need for some thoroughgoing work on the history of photography in early Texas." And mirroring Geiser's rallying cry, it is my wish that this collection will serve as a starting point for those wishing to explore and understand the important and illuminating for those wishing to explore and understand the important and illuminating photographic history of our state.
CHAPTER 2
EARLY TEXAS PHOTOGRAPHY, 1843—1900
THREE YEARS AFTER TEXAS DECLARED its independence from Mexico, an 1839 discovery in France emitted ripples of change around the world, including in the young republic. After years of experimentation by various individuals in England and France, an artist-chemist discovered the first practical and commercially successful photographic process. Named after its inventor, Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre, the daguerreotype is not the type of photograph we know today. Each daguerreotype is literally a one-of-a-kind image. The plate itself was actually placed in the camera when the photograph was created, and no negative was produced. The image was made on a silver-coated copper plate that was made light sensitive by exposure to iodine vapor. After exposure in the camera, the silvered copper plate was developed by the fumes of heated mercury vapor. When the process was complete, a brass mat and cover glass usually secured the daguerreotype plate in one of several types of miniature cases. Though earlier types of photography did exist at the same time, in America none proved suitable for use by a mass public, and none caught on as quickly as the daguerreotype.
On September 20, 1839, the British Queen arrived in New York City, bringing to America the first European newspapers and brochures that revealed the once-secret process for making a daguerreotype. After its introduction to America, one of the primary proponents of the daguerreotype was Samuel F. B. Morse. Soon, a few talented individuals in New York, Philadelphia, and Boston began experimenting with the daguerreotype process, and by the summer of 1840, daguerreotype galleries were operating in those cities. Most of the early daguerreotype images were portraits, but the occasional rare outdoor view was taken. The daguerreotype caught on quickly in the United States, as "photographic artists" migrated down the Atlantic seaboard to the coastal southern states, then around the southern tip of Florida and into the Gulf of Mexico, where they traveled through important port cities such as Mobile, Alabama; New Orleans, Louisiana; and Galveston, Texas.
Many of the early photographers to enter Texas came through the port of Galveston. Others entered on horseback or in traveling wagons that also functioned as portable studios. To date, the earliest documented Texas photographer was a woman known only as "Mrs. Davis," who operated in Houston as early as December 1843. She may be one and the same as C. Davis, a widow with three children who was living in New Orleans when she was enumerated in the 1830 US Census. In November 1843 a Mrs. Davis, along with her three children, sailed from New Orleans on the vessel New York. They arrived in Galveston on November 26; ten days later the first advertisement for daguerreotype portraits by Davis appeared in a Houston newspaper. The advertisement stated that she was "lately arrived in Houston with a complete Daguerotype [sic] apparatus" and that she would remain in the city only two or three weeks before traveling elsewhere. Like many early Texas photographers, Davis was an itinerant operator whose work and eventual location remain anonymous. By 1850 nobody fitting her description appeared in either Louisiana or Texas US Census records.
Davis was not the only individual in Texas in 1843 with an interest in daguerreotypes. In 1842 New York artist John Mix Stanley and his friend Caleb Sumner Dickerman received permission from the secretary of war to visit frontier military forts to "take portraits" of various Indian tribal chiefs. Stanley and Dickerman arrived at Fort Gibson, Indian Territory, in December 1842 and opened a studio where Stanley painted portraits. In early March 1843 they attended a peace treaty council in Texas at the Torrey Brothers trading post on Tehuacana Creek, south of present-day Waco. While at this peace council, Stanley painted portraits of delegates from nine of the attending tribes. A little more than three months after this council, Stanley and Dickerman were advertising themselves at Fort Gibson as daguerreian artists. Were Stanley and Dickerman familiar with the daguerreotype process three months before the advertisement, when they were in Texas at the Tehuacana Creek Council? If so, did they make any daguerreotype portraits while at the council? There is no evidence to date that they did, but the possibility of discovering a long-lost daguerreotype taken at this 1843 council meeting is tantalizing.
Six months after Mrs. Davis began operating in Houston, on June 15, 1844, in the Civilian and Galveston Gazette, B. F. Neal advertised his daguerreotype business opposite the Tremont Hotel in Galveston. Neal gave notice that he would remain in town "a few days longer" and that he wanted to afford an opportunity to individuals who wanted their likeness "executed by this curious and accurate process." This was probably the same Benjamin Franklin Neal who moved to Texas in 1838 and who would become a judge, newspaper publisher, and mayor of Corpus Christi during the 1850s. After Davis, B. F. Neal is the second earliest daguerreotypist documented as working in Texas.
Six weeks after Neal's announcement, another daguerreotypist advertised his services in the same Galveston newspaper. Known only as "Mr. Claude," neither Haynes's Catching Shadows: A Directory of Nineteenth-Century Texas Photographers, nor Palmquist and Kailbourn's Pioneer Photographers from the Mississippi to the Continental Divide: A Biographical Dictionary, 1839–1865, nor even Craig's Daguerreian Registry have previously identified this early Texas photographer. Claude's advertisement on August 31, 1844, makes clear that he had some experience making daguerreotypes before arriving in Texas. He stated that he was set up for business opposite Shaw's Hotel and that he could make images of "the human face and figure, landscapes, buildings, paintings, engravings, statuary, machinery, etc."
By the mid-1840s permanent photographic galleries making daguerreotypes had been established in the larger Texas towns. Henry R. Allen opened a photograph gallery in Houston, a city founded by his two brothers. The Allen gallery was located on the "East side of Main Street, near the Wharf." After an advertisement for his daguerreotype business appeared in a nearby Galveston newspaper, its editor touted Allen's skills as a photographer:
Among the portraits of Mr. Allen's execution are some of the most perfect likenesses we ever beheld. We believe his apparatus is of superior excellence and power. Mr. Allen has had a long experience and much practice in this business, and his thorough knowledge of the chemical laws upon which the whole process is based, is the strongest guarantee that he will be able to give general satisfaction.
Allen was not shy about advertising his daguerreian abilities in the third person. His advertisement in a Houston newspaper five months after the Galveston editorial, reads in part:
H. R. Allen would respectfully call the attention of citizens and strangers visiting the city, to his rooms, where by means of the most perfect apparatus hitherto constructed, together with the latest improvements in operating, he is enabled to make Daguerreotype Portraits, which, for beauty and accuracy of delineation, cannot be surpassed.... Citizens are invited to call and examine specimens of this Wonderful Art, brought to its highest state of perfection.
The last newspaper advertisement for Allen located to date appeared in February 1847. He advertised with a business partner whose surname was Whitfield. Most likely, this refers to Exum Philip Whitfield, a native of North Carolina who immigrated to Texas and worked in several locations as a photographer. Allen did not appear to pursue additional daguerreian work after this short-lived partnership, and he was out of the business sometime in 1847.
Many of these early daguerreian artists reacted to historical events as they documented early Texas and plotted their business locales. In late 1845 Joseph R. Palmer moved his daguerreotype business from New Orleans to Galveston. Barely six weeks later, Palmer moved down the Texas coast to Corpus Christi, where he opened a gallery to take advantage of the impending war with Mexico. Business was good: the little fishing village soon became a flourishing town where General Zachary Taylor organized and drilled thousands of United States Army troops for the impending invasion of Mexico. When Taylor's army moved south and crossed the border into Mexico, Palmer followed. By the summer of 1846 his daguerreotype gallery was operating on the Plaza Hidalgo in Matamoros, Mexico, across the border from Brownsville, Texas.
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Excerpted from Lens on the Texas Frontier by Lawrence T. Jones III. Copyright © 2014 Lawrence T. Jones III. Excerpted by permission of Texas A&M University Press.
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