Levi Crowl’s Southern Career Revealed
Announcing an enlarged and greatly revised biography of photographer Levi Crowl! This West Chester photographer, like many northern photographers, migrated south for the winter. He started doing this in 1855. However, he liked North Carolina so much he stayed, that is, until the outbreak of the Civil War. I discovered a treasure trove of Crowl’s North Carolina newspaper advertisements through online historical newspapers. This included 165 articles or advertisements about Crowl between 1855 and 1861, giving me a wealth of information that I didn’t have previously! The beauty of publishing the photographer biographies in this format is the flexibility I have to update them.
Levi Crowl was a master of advertising, coining his tag line “$1 and upwards”. Crowl came to be known by this phrase. He believed in keeping his name in the local newspapers at least one or more times a week. Unlike other photographers of the day, he did not repeat the same advertisement over and over again. Each one was a unique little quip based on popular culture, literature or news. Some weeks Crowl must have gone to the newspaper office every day with a new two-line pitch. In towns that had more than one newspaper, he was sure to advertise in several ones reaching different readerships.
These advertisements allow us to track his progress through different partnerships and cities in North Carolina. They also show us gaps in time when he again returned North for short periods. I thoroughly enjoyed Crowl’s sense of humor in putting together his ads, so I hope you enjoy them too.
The one mystery is the lack of examples of daguerreotypes, ambrotypes and photographs made by Crowl in public collections or for sale online. I have only seen one example of a daguerreotype shown to me by a library patron about 30 years ago, wherein Crowl did sign the inside of the case beneath the daguerreotype plate. The quality of the work was excellent. For a man who believed in advertising, you would think he would always display his name on his work! So let me know if you have one, I would love to see it.
You can read the revised biography here.
