Cryptorotographs

According to one account of the sale of the Rotograph Co. in 1911, the company's archives housed more than two million photographic images, only a small percentage of which were ever printed as postcards. That total presumably included the images that had been captured by photographers for the National Art Views Company, a short-lived predecessor that Rotograph had acquired in 1904, but many other new views were probably shot during Rotograph's heyday. Thus far I've found no information on the identities of the company's photographers, though such information may exist. Perhaps, like today's surveyors for Google Street View, they quietly went about their business as they roamed cities and small towns, unobtrusively snapping anything they thought might be marketable.

But there's an additional category of work that Rotograph handled, and that was the output of local professional or amateur photographers whose images were printed by Rotograph (or by its affiliated factories in Germany) and sold under proprietary names by druggists, stationers, and other small businesses, often in towns that were small in size or off the beaten path. These images might not bear the Rotograph name, but they can often be at least tentatively identified by diagnostic design elements, in particular the typeface employed.

That Rotograph (and its competitors) did this kind of work is clear from contemporary advertisements. Allen Freeman Davis refers to one such ad in his Postcards from Vermont: a Social History, 1905-1945:

The Rotograph Company of New York, which also published Vermont view cards, advertised that they could have cards printed in Germany at the cost of nine dollars a thousand if at least 3,000 of any subject were ordered. "We require good sharp photographs," the ad announced. "It is very necessary when ordering colored cards to give the color scheme." The company promised delivery in three to five months.

In addition to the choice between monochrome and color (and possibly, how many colors were to be printed, since each additional color would require an additional plate and therefore additional expense) the quality of the finished product, of course, would depend on the skill of the photographer, as well as on communication between the buyer and the printer. For nature scenes a standard palette of colors might serve, but for buildings the printer would have to be told what colors were true to the actual paint on the structures.

Below are several cards likely to have been printed by Rotograph, though they were "published" by local businesses. (The Rotograph Co., incidentally, published other views of some of the same towns using its regular trademark.) All except the last are from towns in the Catskills that were popular resort areas in spite of their small year-round population. The first two (as well as the card at the top of this page, with its misspelling of "queitude") were issued by J. Fahrenholz in Liberty, NY and postmarked in 1907 or 1908.


The next card, also from Liberty, was published by H. M. Stoddard & Son of nearby Stevensville, NY.


The one below was published by the Foyette Souvenir Store, also in Stevensville.


Finally, a postcard from E[dward] Farrington of Tarrytown, NY, whose later activity as a postcard publisher has been examined by Lucas Buresch at Archive Sleuth.


All of the above share the same Art Nouveau-inspired typeface employed by the Rotograph Co.(there must be someone out there who can identify it by name), with a characteristic florid capital "Y." Rotograph used other typefaces as well, so there may well be substantial numbers of additional "cryptorotographs" out there that aren't as instantly recognizable.

All of the cards from the Catskills show here were mailed to the same family, the subject of my earlier post at Dreamers Rise.

Brant Rock

View cards by their nature tend to depict static scenes, with at most a few distant figures strolling on a beach or in the park, but occasionally you find some that capture more focused activity. Below are two images of a demonstration of lifesaving equipment and techniques by members of the US Coast Guard station at Brant Rock, Massachusetts. Clusters of onlookers, some with parasols, stand in the background.


The large building with the adjoining tower — the printer seems to have been a bit uncertain about the color of the roof — was not part of the Coast Guard station but is the Union Chapel, which still stands. I believe the Coast Guard building is the one at far right in the image at the top of the page; it was built in 1892-93 and the keeper from then until 1915 — possibly the man with the flag — was Benjamin B. Manter.

There is at least one additional postcard in this sequence, "U. S. Life Saving Crew with Beach Apparatus" (G7302), and there were also monochrome versions of some or all of the cards.

Below is the beach at Brant Rock. The tower at left in the background may be the Union Chapel but I'm not sure.


Around the time these images were created an inventor named Reginald Aubrey Fessenden built a wireless station on Brant Rock, where the first radio transmission for music and entertainment was reportedly broadcast on December 24, 1906. The Brant Rock station is also credited with the first two-way radio transatlantic transmission, with a station in Scotland, also in 1906. Its antenna was more than 400 feet high, so when completed it probably would have been easily visible to anyone in the vicinity of the Union Chapel as well as from the beach.

On the beach

Here's a selection of seaside images moving roughly from north to south along the coast of Massachusetts. Printed in vivid colors with multiple plates that are not always well-registered, some of them seem to hover between the real world and one that only exists in the mind.


If you look carefully at the two images immediately above, which may have been taken on the same day, you'll notice that the colors of the hotel roof and the chalet-like structures lower down change from one postcard to the next.

Fight Fiercely Harvard

Sports arenas don't last forever; even the original, hallowed Yankee Stadium was eventually deemed antiquated, torn down, and replaced, and the shiny new Shea Stadium of my childhood endured for a paltry thirty-five years or so. Harvard Stadium, only a year or two old when the postcard above was created, has managed to survive for more than a century, so maybe it has now reached the point where its very antiquity will ensure its indefinite preservation.

Be that as it may, I can't help but be reminded of this stirring rendition from the inimitable Tom Lehrer:


Since we're in the neighborhood, below is another Rotograph of Harvard, this one showing the university's Johnson Gate, which also survives.


According to an article in the Harvard Gazette:

The gate is named for Samuel Johnston, Class of 1855, who left Harvard $10,000 for its construction. A resident of Chicago, Johnston is described in his 1886 obituary as a bachelor and a "well-known capitalist," and by a fellow member of the Chicago Club as "a short, ruddy faced bon-vivant." A book of reminiscences by one of Johnston's neighbors describes him drinking a toast on the front steps of his house as the Chicago fire blazed nearby.

Monumenta Americana

This granite monument at Plymouth, Massachusetts was designed by Hammatt Billings (1818-1874), an architect and artist whose varied output included the 1846 Boston Museum (demolished in 1903) and the oft-reproduced illustrations for the first edition of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. His original 1855 proposal, according to historian Richard Stoddard, was for "a colossal composition 153 feet high — comprising a figure of Faith 70 feet high on an 83-foot-high pedestal, projecting from the base of which were four buttresses supporting 40-foot figures of Law, Morality, Education, and Freedom." Though the patrons were enthusiastic, construction delays and inflation eventually led to the downscaling of the project to an 81-foot structure incorporating a 36-foot statue of Faith in addition to the smaller subsidiary figures. It would not be completed until 1889, fifteen years after Billings's death.


The National Monument to the Forefathers still stands, but not so another Billings design, shown above and below, for a granite canopy over Plymouth Rock, the much abused and traveled glacial erratic, unmentioned in 17th-century accounts, that Thomas Faunce, a nonagenarian scion of one of Plymouth's early settlers, had fingered as the very stone on which the colonists had first set foot.


Agnes Rothery, whose 1920 book The Old Coast Road recounting a seaside trip from Boston to Plymouth includes a skeptical, if charitable, account of the Rock's history, was one of the detractors of the Billings canopy:

Just as the mind of man takes a singular satisfaction in gazing at mummies preserved in human semblance in the unearthly stillness of the catacombs, so the once massive boulder — now carefully mended — was placed upon the neatest of concrete bases, and over it was reared, from the designs of Hammatt Billings, the ugliest granite canopy imaginable — in which canopy, to complete the grisly atmosphere of the catacombs, were placed certain human bones found in an exploration of Cole's Hill. Bleak and homeless the old rock now lies passively in forlorn state under its atrocious shelter, behind a strong iron grating, and any of a dozen glib street urchins, in syllables flavored with Cork, or Genoese, or Polish accents, will, for a penny, relate the facts substantially as I have stated them.

It is easy to be unsympathetic in regard to any form of fetishism which we do not share. And while the bare fact remains that we are not at all sure that the Pilgrims landed on this rock, and we are entirely sure that its present location and setting possess no romantic allurement, yet bare facts are not the whole truth, and even when correct they are often the superficial and not the fundamental part of the truth. Those hundreds — those thousands — of earnest-eyed men and women who have stood beside this rock with tears in their eyes, and emotions too deep for words in their hearts, "believing where they cannot prove," have not only interpreted the vital significance of the place, but, by their very emotion, have sanctified it.

It really makes little difference whether the testimony of Thomas Faunce was strictly accurate or not; it really makes little difference that the Hammatt Billings canopy is indeed dreadful. Plymouth Rock has come to symbolize the corner-stone of the United States as a nation, and symbols are the most beautiful and the most enduring expression of any national or human experience.

Around the time Rothery's book appeared, the canopy was in fact demolished and replaced by a more sober McKim, Mead, and White structure that still stands. A few elements were salvaged; in particular the sea shells on the top of the structure were relocated to the grounds of the Monument of the Forefathers. Ungainly and garish as it may have been, the original canopy seems to have had a certain offbeat charm, and I suspect it would be better appreciated now, had it only survived.

Below are some other Rotograph postcards of historic Plymouth, beginning with Alexander Parris's 1824 Pilgrim Hall Museum, which continues to operate.


The Samoset House above, a hotel built in 1846, burned down in the late 1930s, but the Harlow House below still stands.


The message space on the front of the postcard above is awkwardly truncated (remember that at this time only the address was permitted on the back); apparently the company wanted to preserve the lower right-hand corner of the scene.


The Old Colony shown here may be the ship of that name operated by the Fall River Line, which ceased operations in 1937.


Sources: Stoddard, Richard, "Hammatt Billings, Artist and Architect," Old-Time New England Volume LXII, No. 3 (January-March 1972), pp. 57-79. (PDF)

The Old Coast Road was published under Agnes Rothery's pen name, Alice Edwards.

Cape Tragabigzanda

Here are a series of Rotograph images of Gloucester, Massachusetts and the peninsula to which Captain John Smith once gave the outlandish name that is this post's title, in honor, he claimed, of a Greek woman who had aided him during his captivity in Turkey. Sadly, Smith's tongue-twisting onomastic flourish was overruled in favor of the more prosaic "Cape Ann."


The above images are relatively conservative in their coloring; not so the pair immediately below, for which the printer pulled out all the stops, creating a psychedelic seaside world as alluring as it was unreal. Brilliant streaks of orange and purple flare above the horizon. These are by no means "merely" documentary images; they are miniature, bizarre works of fantastic art.


The rock formation shown above, dubbed "Old Mother Ann" and sometimes compared to New Hampshire's now-fallen "Old Man of the Mountain," was the subject of an 1892 book by the formidable Ada C. Bowles, a Gloucester native who became a leading suffragist, temperance campaigner, and ordained Universalist minister. In a capsule biography written while she was still alive, we learn that

She was born in Gloucester, Mass., in 1836. She grew up with a passionate fondness for the sea and is, as she has always been, equally at home either in or on the water. She is an expert swimmer, and her undaunted courage and rare presence of mind have enabled her upon different occasions to rescue persons from drowning.

Nature gave her a sound mind in a sound body, and her early life among the rocks of Cape Ann gave her the well balanced physical development which resulted in a perfectly healthy womanhood.

Among her other talents, "Mrs. Bowles is possessed of remarkable mechanical dexterity and handles a hammer and saw as cleverly as a rolling pin."


The Colonial Arms, above, burned on New Year's Day, 1908. The other hotels shown on this page are also apparently long gone.

Sources: Tolles, Bryant Franklin, Summer by the Seaside: The Architecture of New England Coastal Resort Hotels 1820-1950, University Press of New England, 2008.

I looked for your beans

This alarmingly livid postcard, depicting a disturbingly phallic monument amid what appears to be tropical greenery, is in fact an upright Victorian tribute to the wife of the second president of the United States, Abigail Adams, who is said to have watched the Battle of Bunker Hill from this elevated vantage point in neighboring Quincy. According to Wikipedia, "The cairn was erected June 17, 1896, by the Adams Chapter of the Society of the Daughters of the Revolution."

During reconstruction of the monument in 2008 a time capsule was uncovered containing a parchment declaration, a book, and some newspapers; it was replaced with another capsule containing CDs and flash drives, which, I suspect, will be far less accessible to anyone who may find them a century from now than if they had simply reburied the original documents.

The recipient of the postcard was Mrs. George O. Williams of South Peabody, Mass. I don't know whether her sister ever found her beans.

Marblehead

The town of Marblehead, Massachusetts is set on a peninsula across the harbor from Salem. This selection of view cards includes structures, rocky promontories, and beaches, all as photographed ca. 1905. Nanepashemet, the namesake of the hotel above, was a Sachem of the Pawtucket Confederation until shortly before the arrival of the Pilgrims in 1620. Though he was killed by members of a rival tribe, a contributing factor to his downfall was the smallpox epidemic that decimated much of Native New England in the aftermath of the first contacts with Europeans. The Nanepashemet was destroyed by fire in 1914; the the Rockmere below, which was only a few years old when the image shown was captured, was demolished in 1965.


In the postcard above an additional line of explanatory text was added below the title: "Built 1714 of Materials brought from England." The church still stands.


I at first assumed that "Moll Pitcher" above was an error for "Molly Pitcher," the famous Revolutionary War heroine, but not so; she was a Marblehead (and later Lynn) woman (ca. 1736-1813), renowned as a clairvoyant, who was the subject of a poem by John Greenleaf Whittier, a four-act drama by Joseph Stevens Jones, and an 1895 volume by Ellen Mary Griffin Hoey entitled Moll Pitcher's Prophecies: Or, The American Sibyl.


Above, two nearly identical scenes.


I assume that "Highlaud Ave." was an error for "Highland Ave." Such spelling errors are not uncommon in Rotograph cards.


Sources: Tolles, Bryant Franklin, Summer by the Seaside: The Architecture of New England Coastal Resort Hotels 1820-1950, University Press of New England, 2008.