Friday, February 26, 2010
Tuesday, February 23, 2010
General George Washington first passed this way in 1775 on his journey to take command of the Continental Army.
Wadsworth Atheneum, and this one on the Rochambeau memorial in Rhode Island as a tribute to Rochambeau's valuable aide.
He returned to Hartford the following year, and made his final visit as President on a tour of the Eastern “States” in 1789. The memorial was dedicated in 1932 by the Connecticut Daughters of the Revolution “in abiding reverence”.
Friday, February 19, 2010
People today take photos with their cell phones. Constantly. There was a time, however, when taking a photo was a much slower process. Much slower. What it lacked in convenience, it made up for in creating an intimate and thoughtful record of a world that may not have moved as fast, but would disappear all the same.
In the late 1840s, it was called daguerreotype, and a shopkeeper in the village of Cabotville (see this previous post on the mills girls of Cabotville in Chicopee, Mass., also this post on the Ames Manufacturing Company), was destined to make an enormous contribution to the future of photography.
Albert Sands Southworth was born in West Fairlee, Vermont, 1811. He attended Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass., and after a short stint at teaching, came to Cabotville to open a drug store in 1839.
In “The Spirit of Fact - The Dauguerreotypes of Southworth & Hawes, 1843-1862” by Robert A. Sobieszek and Odette M. Appel (David R. Godine, Boston, 1976) a book on the partnership of Southworth and Hawes, the authors quote from Southworth’s letters to his sister Nancy about his life in Cabotville and his “little office.”
Cabotville was still the northernmost village of Springfield at the time (until its separation in 1848 to form the Town of Chicopee), fairly quiet except for the stirrings of its new industrial life.
Southworth is described as adventurous, and ambitious. Cabotville must have been too quiet for the outgoing young man of 28, or the daily occupation of his drug store too dull, for he reported to his sister of his restlessness.
But, something was on the horizon that would change his life.
In 1840, a series of lectures was given by Francois Gouraud in Boston, Providence, and New York. Gouraud was a student of Daguerre’s, and he represented the company licensed to sell Daguerre’s camera and manual.
Southworth was interested. Through these lectures, he discovered his future occupation. He traveled to New York to visit Joseph Pennell, his former roommate at Phillips Academy to discuss daguerreotype and the telegraph. Southworth studied under Morse in his New York studio, after which he and his friend Pennell returned to Cabotville to begin further experiments in daguerreotype.
They began their partnership in this new field with a capital of less than $50, and their new venture would prove quite costly. But, there was a market. Once photography became known to the public, everyone wanted his daguerreotype taken.
It took anywhere from 10 to 25 minutes of sitting or standing absolutely still.
The subject's eyes often remained closed, because of the torture of staring without blinking. Absolutely no movement.
However, for the first time in history, average people could keep a likeness of themselves or their loves ones looking completely realistic. In sentimental Victorian days, this went over big.
Southworth, enthusiastic about his new trade, constantly experimented to improve the quality of his work. He was the first to use reflective lenses in his cameras, made for him by a Southwick, Mass. manufacturer. He later invented the Grand Parlor Stereoscope or stereopticon, without which no mid-19th century home was complete. Ancient View Master to you Baby Boomers.
In the spring of 1941, Southworth left Cabotville for Boston and the prominent figures he would photograph with his new partner, Josiah Johnson Hawes. He would photograph Daniel Webster, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Ralph Waldo Emerson, educator Horace Mann, and popular singer Jenny Lind, and President Franklin Pierce, among others.
Nearly ten years after he had arrived in Cabotville, three daguerreotypists were operating in that town within a few blocks of each other.
Now the power of photography is in everyone’s hands. Or phones.
NOTE: The above tintypes are not, to my knowledge, by Albert Southworth, only used for examples of the style of photography of the day. For more on Southworth, have a look at his photos on this website of the American Museum of Photography.
Tuesday, February 16, 2010
“Do you know,” Madame Roland commented in a letter written about 1790, “that Massachusetts is very barbarous name?”
Van Wyck Brooks, whose reputation as a chronicler of New England literature has rather diminished in the several decades since he published his books on 19th and early 20th century greats, recounts Mme. Roland’s charge in his “From a Writer’s Notebook” (EP Dutton & Co, Inc., NY, 1958).
Mme. Roland continued her tirade, “A man of fashion was never known to utter such a word (Massachusetts!) when saying soft things to the fair sex…I have heard of a lady who was so shocked at the sound of Transylvania, which was quite new to her, that she desired the impertinent speaker to leave the room.”
To be sure, Mme. Roland, who, despite her support of the French Revolution, was nevertheless carted off to the guillotine during the Reign of Terror, has a more famous quote attributed to her: “Oh, liberty, what crimes are committed in thy name!”
Still, my sentimental favorite is the one about Massachusetts being a barbarous name. Evidently, she was not alone in her opinion.
According to Mr. Brooks, literary scholar Léon Bazalgette “could not endure the word (Massachusetts!), but …was obliged to use it, called it “le Mass.”
Friday, February 12, 2010
Here on Route 9 in Bennington, Vermont is the Old First Church, formed by separatists from Connecticut and Western Massachusetts, and is today considered Vermont’s Colonial Shrine.
For more on the history of this church and congregation, have a look at the Old First Church website.
Tuesday, February 9, 2010
Friday, February 5, 2010
The names Washington, Grant, and Lincoln are engraved in stone on the frieze at the top of the Adams Public Library in Adams, Massachusetts. The Civil War had barely ended when monuments and memorials took the form of Americans’ most fervent and serious expressions of patriotism. In this case, General, later President Grant, and President Lincoln joined Washington in the Valhalla of yet another small town’s consciousness.
Tuesday, February 2, 2010
Interesting how in the early years of the last century architecture reflected on a classic past even in that era of a self-professed progressive future. Our modern architecture seems less inspiring today, at least the examples of it that seem to deny we even have a past.