Portrait of the past : a photographic journey through Wisconsin

174 Pages·1971·41.369 MB·English

P O r t r a i t o f t h e P a s t
A Photographic Journey Through Wisconsin
Jill
Howard Mead, Dean, and Susan Smith

a s t
A PHOTOGRAPHIC JOURNEY THROUGH WISCONSIN
1865-1920
Howard Mead, Jill Dean, and Susan Smith
Wisconsin Trails
Madison, Wisconsin
This reprint is dedicated to the people ofW isconsin in honor of the state's sesquicentennial.
May we remember and cherish the past.
Copyright© 1971, 1998 Wisconsin Tales and Trails, Inc.
First edition, first printing 1971
Fourth printing 1998
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form
or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording,
or by any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 72-185287
ISBN: 0-915024-61-6
Designer: William T. Pope
Printed in Canada.
Wisconsin Trails
P.O. Box 5650
Madison, WI 53705
[phone]
E-mail: [email protected]
Foreword
N THE PREFACE to his autobiography, published in 1897, Milwau the faces in them have grown familiar. We have begun to think of the
keean and former slave Lewis Hughes wrote, ''As the enlightenment of people as family. And in a way, they are kin, for their lives, recorded on
each generation depends upon the thoughtful study of the history of those the pages that follow and bound to us by the flow of history, make up our
who have gone before, everything which tends to fullness and accuracy in past. And so we hope this book will be for each reader what it has been
that history is of value." Although we do not pretend that Portrait of the for us-a journey home.
Past is a comprehensive history, we believe that each photograph we have We are exceedingly grateful for the cooperation and assistance we
selected will contribute to an understanding of the past and will lend a have received from everyone associated with the production of Portrait of
new perspective to the present. the Past, but we wish to express special appreciation to the following indi
Each photograph represents a fleeting instant, a unique situation that viduals and the organizations they represent:
has been freed from the hold of history and preserved for our inspection.
Our response to a photograph is colored by our individual experiences and John Kuony, Oshkosh Public Museum
tastes, but the basic, objective reality of each image is constant and pro Marsha Peters, State Historical Society ofWisconsin
vides us with a link, however tenuous, to a vanished moment. In a way Leo Johnson, Milwaukee Public Museum
that words cannot accomplish, a photograph gives us immediate insight Robert Carroon, Milwaukee County Historical Society
into the lives of the people of another age. For on the two-dimensional Ruth Bennett Dyer, H.H. Bennett Studio
surface of the page, we can look backward into the third and fourth Robert Parkinson, Circus World Museum.
dimensions of time and space.
We have worked with the photographs in this volume for so long that November 1971
3
The Mirror with a Memory
EW DISCOVERIES have been greeted with more wonderment and awe
than was Louis Daguerre's daguerreotype, "the mirror with a memory," as one
contemporary called it. Though daguerreotypes-fragile, positive images on
silver-plated copper sheets-were exquisite, they could not be reproduced,
and were obsolete almost before they were introduced in 1839. That same
year, William Talbot began producing calotypes, positive prints from paper
negatives, and by 1847, Abel Niepce de St. Victor had developed a photo
graphic process using glass plates coated with an emulsion of light-sensitive
compounds suspended in egg white.
Refinements of this technique in the 1850s led to wet-plate photography,
the method in vogue while Wisconsin was being settled. Wisconsin's early
photographers had to have nimble fingers, flexible wrists, and infinite
patience. First they poured an emulsion on the glass plate. Then they tipped
the plate back and forth until the surface was evenly covered. Next the plate
was sensitized in silver nitrate and, while still damp, exposed. The image had
to be developed before the emulsion dried, so frontier photographers were
forced to carry cumbersome equipment with them at all times.
Yet in spite of these drawbacks, many extraordinary photographs were
made by the wet-plate process, some of which are reproduced in this volume.
It was, after all, with this technique that such singular Wisconsin photogra
phers as H.H. Bennett of Wisconsin Dells, Charles Van Schaick of Black
River Falls, Effie Howlett of Oshkosh, and W.R. Parks of lola recorded the
The face of an early Wisconsinite
beauty and banality of everyday life in their respective hometowns. In the
was recorded on a tintype.
1890s, the development of roll film would change the photographer's life
immeasurably, but his product-the photograph-would remain an object of
fascination and delight, a mirror with a memory longer than the mind of man,
and a gateway into a vanished past.
This was the studio from which Black River Falls photographer
Charles VanSchaick worked between 1880 and 1929.
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Contents
The Days of the Lumberjack ... 6
A Rural Remembrance ...... 22
A Village Visit . 50
Men in Motion . 76
A traveling photographer carried his cumbersome equipment
around the countryside in a specially designed wagon.
City Sidewalks .. 104
A Life of Leisure ..... . 130
The Fabric of Life 152
Acknowledgments ......... 176
5
The Days of the Lumberjack
VEN IN DARKEST December and January, the lumberjack's day began each stroke of the ax and each cut of the saw. The cold air rang with
any time from four o'clock in the morning on as the cook beat on a tin the cry of "timber," the final thundering crack of the huge trees, and the
pan and bellowed "Daylight in the swamp; roll out your dead bodies." The curses of the teamsters urging their teams to pull mammoth loads of logs
timber beast ate off tin plates, drank out of tin cups, and used tin utensils. weighing seventy-five tons or more. Wisconsin's seemingly inexhaustible
A crew of 100 loggers bolting their food in fifteen minutes or less must white-pine forest was leveled by these tough, lusty timber beasts in less
have made a tremendous racket. One bunkhouse poet called it a "rum than sixty winters, almost fifty in the last century and ten in this one.
bling symphony in tin." Eating, after all, was not a social event. One old lumberjack hit the nail on the head when he said, "We cut the
After a long day in the woods, the bunkhouse was another world. It top right off the state and fires done the rest."
was hazy with smoke, hot and stuffy near the big stove, cold and drafty The exploitation of the northern Wisconsin pinery and the fires that
away from it. And only a little of the fragrance of wet woolen clothing was followed left a wasteland that staggers the imagination. John Curtis de
wafted out through the skylight! The life of the lumberjack was not easy scribed it like this: "The desolation of much of the pine area is difficult to
and it certainly was not romantic. describe. In many places the entire landscape as far as the eye could see
It was the lumberjack's job to cut trees. And cut trees he did. From supported not a single tree more than a few inches in diameter. Only the
daylight to dark, from first freeze to first thaw, the lumberjack worked in gaunt stumps of the former pines, frequently with their root systems fully
sub-zero cold and snow, snow, and more snow. Though thickly blanketed exposed as a result of the consumption of the topsoil by fire, remained to
with white, the forest was not silent. The big pines, many of them 400 indicate that the area was once a forest rather than a perpetual barren."
years old and up to ten feet in diameter, creaked and groaned, protesting
These lumberjacks were spending the winter of 1886 at Wall and McNaire's
logging shanty deep in northeastern Wisconsin's snowbound pinery.
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......
An average
day's work for a
pair of sawyers
was at least 100
pine logs- all
like this one if
they were lucky.
This frosty
team ofhorses
is skidding a
logon a
"go-devil,"
a travoislike
sled, at Ole
E1nerson's
Ca1np near
Cable in 1904.
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.. ...
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