This photograph has six people, two mules and a dog in it, but it is always the cow that catches people’s attention. In the Great Plains of the United States it was commonplace for early settlers to build simple houses out of sod to shelter their family until they could afford more substantial homes. In this case, the Rawding family built their soddy into the side of a hill, so the grazing cow is both on the hillside, and on the roof of the house. The people in the image are (left to right) Emma (Leadbetter) Rawding, Sylvester W. Rawding, daughter Bessie, and sons Philip, William, and Harry.

This public domain image was taken in 1886 by Solomon Devore Butcher (1856-1927) near Sargent, in Custer County Nebraska. We profiled Butcher in our post of his photograph of Broken Bow Hardware. Butcher is listed in the 1900 census in West Union, Nebraska, and in the 1910 census in Kearney, Nebraska, still active as a photographer.

This is a portrait of Henry Laurens Dawes (1816-1903), a politician from Massachusetts. He was a state senator and U.S. district attorney before becoming a United States senator 1875-93. He was involved with anti-slavery issues and Indian Affairs. At the time this photograph was taken (ca 1865) he was still United States district attorney for the western district of Massachusetts.

This public domain image is attributed to the Brady National Photographic Art Gallery, rather than an individual photographer, since there is no way to tell which of the several ‘operators’ that worked there actually took the photograph. Mathew Brady opened the studio at at 350-352 Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington DC in 1858, and hired Alexander Gardner to run it, although a couple years later Gardner was off to photograph the Civil War, and by 1862 had ended his association with Brady. In 1868 the studio was seized for debt and sold at auction, but Brady manged to buy it back. The address changed that year to 625-627 Pennsylvania Avenue, so we know photographs such as this that bear the old address were made before then.

This photograph shows one of those highly geometric, yet almost chaotic with growth, gardens so popular in Victorian era New England. It also shows the home of Gardiner Greene Hubbard in Manchester, Massachusetts, the first president of the National Geographic Society, and financier and philanthropist. The photograph was taken by his daughter Mabel. Just why it is called the garden flag, when the flag appears to be on the other side of the house, I can’t fathom. In any case, the flag is at half-mast on the death of General / President Grant, so the image dates from July 1885.

The photographer was Mabel Gardiner Hubbard Bell, who lost her hearing when she was four or five years old, due to Scarlet Fever. To help her cope, she became a student of a teacher who specialized in helping deaf students, Alexander Graham Bell. When she was 19 they married. By the time she took this photograph in 1885 she and Alexander had two daughters aged 5 and 7, and had suffered the loss of two baby boys who died as infants, and she was just approaching her 28th birthday. Her husband’s eight year old Bell Telephone Company, was providing his telephone service to about 100,000 Americans.

Here is one of the most famous cathedrals in the world, but only an aficionado would recognize it. This is the west view, and and it looks like just another blocky church. Most people are more familiar with the other side, where the distinctive flying buttresses give it a profile as memorable as that tower thing in another part of the city. This is, of course, Notre-Dame Cathedral, in Paris. The premiere example of Gothic architecture, construction took from 1163 until about 1345, over 175 years. And here it is in a picture about 150 years old.

This public domain image was taken by photographer Edouard Baldus (1813-1882), probably around 1852 when he undertook an extensive architectural study of Paris scenes. Baldus was a Prussian-born artist, working first as a painter and lithographer, and only turning to photography in 1849. Curiously, he seems to have used a version of the Calotype process, using paper negatives, rather than daguerreotypes — even though he was working in France, birthplace of daguerreotypy. He used large negatives, as big as 10 x 14 inches, much larger than any daguerreotype plates available at that time. Contact printing such a large negative overcame some of the limitations of using the paper-based negative.