Originally published in the Cecil Whig
The last known picture of President Lincoln alive is the famous Alexander Gardner photograph that features a crack across it. The crack resulted from a broken glass plate upon which the picture was taken in February of 1865, just prior to the end of the Civil War.
Glass plate photography was invented by one John Herschel in 1839. It remained the primary means of taking pictures through Gardner’s day and into 1884 when George Eastman replaced the glass with paper or film.
Last year, the Historical Society of Cecil County was loaned four boxes containing about 600 old glass plate negatives, courtesy of the Historical Society of Harford County which received them from the Stepping Stone Museum. The original owner was a Mrs. Johns Hopkins for whom the collection is named. One of the boxes contains several plates taken of Cecil County locations. Society volunteer, Rich Wilson, has been reviewing the documents that came with the plates, determining what’s on the plates, scanning the images to a CD, and cataloguing them for us.
Rich says the negatives date back to the late 1800s up to about 1915 and are relatively valuable from a historical perspective. “Of the 30 or so pictures of Cecil County,” Rich explains, “a great many are of the Elk River and pulp mills that lined the river. There are pictures with schooners bringing materials to the mills. There are also plates with pre-dam images of Conowingo.”
Many of the plates are accompanied by a piece of crumbling now brown paper with a brief, hand written explanation of who or what is on the plate and the date. “I think what drew me to the glass plate negatives is their niche in photographic history as much as the history of Cecil County that they captured. You just do not see these anymore,” Rich explained, “due to their fragile nature and these in particular are in great shape.”
The goal is to digitize all of the Cecil County plates and make the plate description available to the public for a wide range of research purposes. “Overarching all of these projects has been the setting up of a word searchable visual collection of photographs. Currently,” Rich says, “(the collection is) some 1200 pictures strong with another 1000 plus photos to be added.”
Working with these photographic plates is nothing new for Rich. Other Historical Society photographic projects with which Rich has worked include “digitizing the Ward Abrahams Collection, both the Frazer and Holt collections, and currently working on a collection of Guy Rhoades negatives: organizing and indexing some 600 negatives prior to digitizing.” Information about the Rhoades collection can be found on the society’s web site which notes that “this holding is strongest for images in the 19th and first-half of the 20th century and that makes it an extremely valuable holding for early photographic research.”
So, what draws Rich to working with such old and fragile artifacts? He says the key is availability. “This is an ongoing effort to make more accessible the massive number of photographs housed with the Historical Society.”
For more information about the glass plate collection or any of the society’s photographs, contact the Historical Society of Cecil County through our web site at www.cecilhistory.org