This is a view of the infamous Libby Prison in Richmond Virginia, as it appeared in April 1865 when Union soldiers under Ulysses S Grant captured the city. By that time it was being used to house Confederate military criminals, who doubtlessly fared no better than the Union soldiers who preceded them. The Union prisoners, perhaps as many as 40,000 at one time, had been moved to other Confederate prisons in 1864, in part due to the high mortality rate. Prisoners, mostly officers, were underfed, overcrowded and wracked with diseases made worse by unsanitary conditions.

This public domain image is another Andrew J Russell photograph. We gave information on the photographic career of Russell along with his image of the Capitol Building in Washington DC.

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 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.

This image shows nine men dressed in traditional Native-American costume, in front and on top of a reconstruction of a Six-Nations Long House. There is also a gentleman in the background wearing a sheriff’s badge. The image is captioned ‘Indians from N.Y. State Reservation’. It was taken in 1901 at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo New York.

The photographer was Charles Dudley Arnold, whom we profiled in an earlier post on the Temple of Music building at this same exposition.