Chester County Photographist News
I am pleased to announce that my article “Visual Memories of Chester County” is featured in the latest edition of Chester County Ledger published by the Chester County Historic Preservation Network. The mission of the CCHPN “is to connect local governments, organizations, and individuals in their efforts to protect, preserve, and promote the historic resources and cultural landscapes of Chester County through communication and education.”
Editor Catherine Quillman focused the whole issue on visual historians and recorders who through words, drawings and photographs have captured the county’s architecture and landscape providing necessary primary source material useful to historic preservationists. Some of the visual historians highlighted include artist Henry T. MacNeill, historian Frederick Sheeder, and photographers Octavius Bull, Ned Goode, Gilbert Cope, J. Max Mueller and Robert Brinton.
The delightful cover illustration by Ann Bedrick captures perfectly photographer Octavius Bull at work behind his camera. Bull photographed the built environment and residents in northwestern Chester County extensively between 1900-1906. He hand-printed his photographs in postcard format and hand labeled them. Despite physical challenges, Bull traveled throughout the area with his camera. Bedrick depicts Bull steadying himself with his crutch as he focuses his camera to photograph Harry Hause’s store in E. Nantmeal Township.
Amateur photographers J. Max Mueller, Gilbert Cope and Robert F. Brinton are featured in my article titled “Visual Memories of Chester County.” All three had different reasons for taking up photography. Mueller considered becoming a photographer after the Civil War but became an organist and music teacher instead. Photography for him was a fine art, in the process he captured many views of West Chester during the 1890s which historians rely upon for showing accurate details of the Borough. Gilbert Cope was a genealogist who used photography to copy historical documents and record family homesteads for this genealogy publications. He photographed between 1887 and 1917. Robert F. Brinton was a postal historian who documented the locations of post offices in Chester County in the mid-1930s and in the process recorded many crossroad villages that no longer exist.
Which brings me to this point. Had these people not had the foresight to donate their photographs to a public institution, the community would have been deprived of all these wonderful images that document how our county looked at different points in time. If you are cleaning out your closets remember that photographs you may have taken, or inherited from an ancestor may have high value to historians. Take the time to offer them to an appropriate historical institution and let them decide if they wish to include them in their collections. Countless future historians will thank you!
So take a look at the many resources the Chester County Historic Preservation network has to offer on their website at cchpn.org.
