Photographers

Harriet Beecher Stowe House, Hartford, Connecticut

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The Harriet Beecher Stowe House on Forest Street in Hartford, around 1905. Image courtesy pf the Library of Congress, Detroit Publishing Company Collection.

The scene in 2020:

Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author who was made famous by her 1852 anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, was born in 1811 in Litchfield, Connecticut. She grew up in Connecticut and attended the Hartford Female Seminary, but she subsequently moved to Ohio, where she met her husband, Calvin Ellis Stowe, and then to Brunswick, Maine, where she wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin. From there, they moved to Andover, Massachusetts, before finally returning to Connecticut in 1864.

Here in Hartford, the Stowes constructed a Gothic Revival mansion along the banks of the Park River. Known as Oakholm, the house was a dream home for Harriet, and she built it using much of the money that she had earned through the sale of her books. However, it proved too expensive to maintain, and the Stowes ultimately sold the house in 1870. The house was demolished in 1905, and the site of the house is now approximately where Interstate 84 crosses Capitol Avenue.

The Stowes’ final house, seen here in these two photos, was constructed in 1871 by Franklin Chamberlin, a lawyer who owned a large tract of land at the corner of Forest Street and Farmington Avenue. The Stowes purchased the house in 1873, and a year later they were joined by Mark Twain, who built a house just around the corner from here on Farmington Avenue. These two famous authors became the leading figures in Hartford’s flourishing literary scene, and they remained neighbors until 1891, when Mark Twain and his family moved to Europe.

In the meantime, Harriet Beecher Stowe continued to write while living in this house, although none of her subsequent works could top her first novel, which had sold more copies during the 19th century than any other book except for the Bible. She was also involved in civic organizations such as the Hartford Society for Decorative Art, which she helped to establish in 1877 along with several other notable Hartford women, including Mark Twain’s wife Olivia Clemens. The society was later renamed the Hartford Art School, and it is now part of the University of Hartford.

Calvin Stowe died in 1886, and Harriet’s health soon began to deteriorate. She evidently suffered from Alzheimer’s disease, and displayed erratic behavior such as wandering around the neighborhood, sometimes even entering her neighbors’ gardens and homes. She also took to rewriting Uncle Tom’s Cabin from memory, unaware that she had already written it. She outlived her husband by a decade, and lived here in this house until her death in 1896, at the age of 85.

Stowe’s children subsequently sold the house to Frances Z. Niles, a wealthy heiress whose father, Jonathan S. Niles, had been a prominent foundry owner. She was living in the house when the first photo was taken around 1905, and the 1910 census shows her here along with her niece, Caroline Hansell, and two servants. Neither Frances nor Caroline had ever married, and they lived here until Frances’s death in 1922. She left an estate that was valued at over $90,000, or nearly $1.4 million today. The house itself was valued at $17,000, but her single greatest asset was 33 shares of Aetna, valued at over $44,000.

In 1924, nearly 30 years after the Stowe family sold the house, it was purchased by Harriet’s niece, Katharine Seymour Day. She moved into the house, and became an outspoken advocate of historic preservation. Perhaps her single most important accomplishment in this field came in the late 1920s, when she spearheaded an effort to rescue the neighboring Mark Twain House from potential demolition. Through her leadership, the Mark Twain Memorial and Library Commission was established, which purchased the house in 1929 and subsequently restored it. Then, in 1940, she purchased the house directly to the right of hers, which had once been owned by Franklin Chamberlin.

Today, very little has changed in this scene. The house is still standing, and it is now the centerpiece of the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center, which offers guided tours of the home. The organization also owns the house on the right, which is now known as the Katharine Seymour Day House. It now houses administrative offices, along with a research library. Although not visible in this scene, the Mark Twain House is also still standing, and it is located directly behind the Stowe House. It is operated by a separate organization, but it is also open to the public for tours. Because of their connections to two of the most important American writers of the 19th century, both of these homes are now listed as National Historic Landmarks, the highest level of recognition on the National Register of Historic Places.

Katharine Seymour Day House, Hartford, Connecticut

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The house at the corner of Forest Street and Farmington Avenue in Hartford, around 1905. Image courtesy of the Library of Congress, Detroit Publishing Company Collection.

The house in 2020:

This house was built in 1884, and was designed by noted New York architect Francis H. Kimball. It features a variety of exterior colors and building materials, as was typical for Queen Ann-style homes of this period, including light-colored limestone and contrasting brownstone trim. Other common Queen Anne elements include an asymmetrical facade, along with a complex roof that is filled with an eclectic mix of gables and dormers. This style was particularly common in the United States during the 1880s and 1890s, with this house dating to the early part of that period.

The original owner of this house was Franklin Chamberlin, a lawyer who had once owned much of the land here at the corner of Forest Street and Farmington Avenue. In 1871, he had constructed a house just to the left of here, at 73 Forest Street, and in 1873 he sold it to Harriet Beecher Stowe. A year later, he sold another part of his land to Mark Twain, who constructed a house of his own on the property. However, Chamberlain retained the corner lot for himself, and subsequently built this house, which was flanked on either side by two of the country’s most celebrated authors.

Chamberlin died in 1896, but his widow Mary lived here in this house until her death in 1907. The next owner of the house was Willie Olcott Burr, the editor of the Hartford Times. His father, Alfred Edmund Burr, had been the editor of the newspaper for 60 years, and Willie began working for him as a teenager in 1861. The newspaper prospered under both father and son, and by the early 20th century it had the largest circulation of any paper in the state. Willie Burr moved into this house sometime in the early 1910s, and the 1920 census shows him living here with his wife Angie and two servants. He died only a year later, although Angie would continue to live here throughout the 1920s and 1930s.

In 1940, the house was purchased by Katharine Seymour Day, who was the grandniece of Harriet Beecher Stowe. She had previously purchased her great aunt’s former home next door, and in the late 1920s she led the effort to save the Mark Twain House, which was being threatened with demolition at the time. Her 1940 acquisition of this house helped to further preserve the neighborhood, and the house is still standing today, with few noticeable differences between the two photos. Along with the neighboring Stowe House, it is now part of the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center, and it serves as offices and as a research library for the organization.

Rosecliff, Newport, Rhode Island

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The Rosecliff mansion on Bellevue Avenue in Newport, around 1910-1915. Image courtesy of the Library of Congress, George Grantham Bain Collection.

The scene in 2018:

Rosecliff was one of the many Gilded Age summer homes that were built in Newport during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It was completed in 1902, and was originally the home of businessman Hermann Oelrichs (1850-1906) and his wife, the silver heiress Theresa Fair Oelrichs (1871-1926). The property had previously been owned by George Bancroft (1800-1891), a prominent historian, politician, and diplomat who had served as U. S. Secretary of the Navy from 1845 to 1846, Minister to the United Kingdom from 1846 to 1849, and Minister to Germany from 1867 to 1874. During this time, he maintained a modest summer home here in Newport, which was named Rosecliff for his extensive rose garden.

Following Bancroft’s death in 1891, the Oelrichs purchased the Rosecliff property. The old house was demolished, and they hired the prominent architectural firm of McKim, Mead & White to design a new, larger, and far more elegant replacement. Most of the design work was done by Stanford White, whose earlier Newport commissions included the Isaac Bell House. Although built less than 20 years after the Isaac Bell House, Rosecliff represented a significant shift in White’s designs, from the Shingle style of the 1880s to the Beaux-Arts style of the turn of the century. It also reflected the changes in tastes among the Newport elite, who increasingly demanded summer “cottages” that were modeled after European palaces. In this case, Rosecliff was based on the design of the Grand Trianon at Versailles, which had been built during the reign of Louis XIV.

Hermann and Theresa Oelrichs lived in New York, but spent summers here at Rosecliff, where Theresa was one of the leaders of Newport society. As such, her house was designed for entertaining. Its ballroom, which measures 40 by 80 feet, is the largest in Newport, and it occupies the entire central section of the first floor, between the two projecting wings. The entire house has a total of 30 rooms, is 28,800 square feet in size, and was built at a cost of $2.5 million, or over $73 million today.

The house was built using the wealth that Theresa had inherited from her father, James Graham Fair (1831-1894). Fair had come to the United States in 1843 as a poor young Irish immigrant, but he went on to make his fortune in silver mining following the discovery of the Comstock Lode in Nevada. He also served one term as a U. S. Senator from Nevada, from 1881 to 1887, but was defeated for re-election in 1886. Despite – or perhaps because of – this vast wealth, Fair had a strained relationship with his wife and children, thanks in no small part to his serial adultery. His wife, also named Theresa, divorced him in 1883, and his daughter Theresa did not even invite him to her wedding in 1890. However, this did not stop the younger Theresa from accepting his $1 million wedding gift, nor the $40 million inheritance that she and her sister split after his death in 1894. She would eventually honor his legacy by building the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco and naming it for him.

Hermann Oelrichs died in 1906, but Theresa continued to spend summers here at Rosecliff until her death in 1926 at the age of 55. Her only child, Hermann Oelrichs, Jr. (1891-1948) inherited the property, but by this point Newport’s massive Gilded Age mansions were falling out of fashion. This would only get worse in the wake of the Great Depression, and Oelrichs ultimately sold the house in 1941 for just $21,000. Adjusted for inflation, this was less than a half of a percent of what his parents had spent to build Rosecliff only 40 years earlier.

The new owner of Rosecliff was Gertrude Niesen (1911-1975), a singer, actress, and Vaudeville performer who was active during the 1930s and 1940s. She owned it for several years, but during this time the house sustained serious damage from a frozen water pipe. She subsequently sold it to Ray Alan Van Clief, who restored the interior, but he was killed in a car accident while on his way to visit the house for the first time after the completion of the renovations.

The next owner of the house was J. Edgar Monroe (1897-1992), a wealthy New Orleans businessman who purchased the property in 1947. He and his wife Louise spent summers here until 1971, when they donated Rosecliff to the Preservation Society of Newport County, a nonprofit organization that owns many of the historic mansions in Newport, including The Breakers and Marble House. The house was opened to the public, and over the years it has also been used as a filming location for a variety of movies, including The Great Gatsby (1974), True Lies (1994), Amistad (1997), and 27 Dresses (2008). Today, the exterior of the house has not significantly changed since the first photo was taken over a century ago, and it is now a contributing property in the Bellevue Avenue Historic District, which was designated as a National Historic Landmark district in 1973.

Hadley Falls Dam, Holyoke, Mass

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The Hadley Falls Dam on the Connecticut River, on the border of Holyoke and South Hadley, around 1900-1910. Image courtesy of the Library of Congress, Detroit Publishing Company Collection.

The scene in 2025:

As mentioned in the previous post, Holyoke is the site of the largest waterfall on the Connecticut River, with a drop of 58 feet. This made the location ideal for large-scale industrial development, and during the mid-19th century Holyoke was transformed into a prosperous manufacturing center. The first dam was built here in 1848, but it was poorly constructed, and it failed just hours after the gates were closed. However, a new dam was constructed the following year. It was built of wood, extending 1,017 feet across the river, and was 30 feet tall, with timbers that were firmly anchored four feet deep into the bedrock beneath the river.

This second dam proved far more durable than its short-lived predecessor, and it remained in use for the rest of the 19th century. However, by the early 1890s there was a need for a new dam, this time built of stone. Construction began in 1892, with the new dam being located 150 feet downstream of the old one. It took three years just to excavate the bottom of the river, and the work involved the removal of some 13,000 cubic yards of bedrock. Construction of the dam itself began around 1896, and it was comprised of a combination of rubble stone taken from the riverbed downstream of the dam, along with quarried granite blocks from Vinalhaven, Maine. The work was done in several different stages, as described in a 1900 article in the Journal of the Association of Engineering Societies:

The dam was constructed in four sections, the south end and a center section just north of the drain channel being built up for a considerable height first. Then a coffer dam was built on the first level of the north channel, thus turning the water through the center channel, while a section of dam 5 feet high was constructed behind it. The coffer was then transferred to the center channel, and a section 10 feet high built in that opening. In this way the alternate sections were built in until the structure was complete. The cost of the entire work is said to have been between $600,000 and $700,000.

Upon completion in 1900, the dam measured 1,020 feet across the river, and is said to have been the longest dam in the world at the time. The first photo was taken sometime soon after its completion, and shows water pouring over the top of the dam. On the far right is part of the Carew Manufacturing Company, a paper mill that was located on the South Hadley side of the dam, and in the distance on the right side is Mount Tom, with the Summit House prominently visible atop the 1,202-foot traprock mountain.

Today, more than a century after the first photo was taken, both the Carew factory and the Summit House are gone. However, the dam itself is still here, after having survived a number of major floods during the 20th century. Holyoke is no longer the major industrial city that it once was, but the dam and the canal system are still used to generate power. Both are now operated by the city-owned Holyoke Gas & Electric, with the hydroelectric generators here at the dam provide a significant portion of Holyoke’s electricity.

Carew Manufacturing Company, South Hadley, Mass

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The Hadley Falls Dam and the Carew Manufacturing Company, as seen from the Route 116 bridge over the Connecticut River on the border of Holyoke and South Hadley, in 1936. Image taken by Lewis Hine, courtesy of the U. S. National Archives.

The scene in 2017:

At over 400 miles in length, the Connecticut River is, by far, the longest river in New England, and flows north to south through the region, from the border of Canada all the way to Long Island Sound. It passes over a number of rapids and waterfalls during its course, the largest of which is here on the border of Holyoke and South Hadley, Massachusetts, with a drop of 58 feet. This is also the last major waterfall on the river, and throughout the colonial era it was a major obstacle to river navigation, requiring a costly 2.5-mile portage around the falls.

This problem was partially solved in 1795, when a canal opened on the South Hadley side of the river. It was located on the other side of where the mill buildings stood in the first photo, and it was the first navigable canal in the country, predating longer and more famous ones like the Erie Canal by several decades. However, by the middle of the 19th century, railroads had replaced canals as the most important form of inland transportation, and the South Hadley Canal ultimately closed in 1862.

With the decline of river transportation, along with the rise of industry, this waterfall began to be seen as a major asset, rather than as an obstacle. Industrial development began in the early 19th century, with mills on the South Hadley side, but the most dramatic change to this area came in the the middle of the century. The west side of the river, once a part of West Springfield, was incorporated as Holyoke in 1850, and was developed into a major industrial center. This included the construction of a dam across the river, an extensive power canal system through Holyoke, and a number of large factory complexes.

As a result, Holyoke’s industrial development quickly outpaced that of its older neighbor on the other side of the river. However, South Hadley continued to operate several factories of its own, including two paper mills on the right side of the dam. The one closest to the dam was the Carew Manufacturing Company, and was established in 1848. Its original factory burned in 1873, but it was subsequently replaced by the brick building in the first photo, and produced writing paper for many years. Just to the right of the Carew factory was the Hampshire Paper Company, which was built in the early 1860s and produced the well-known Old Hampshire Bond writing paper.

The first photo was taken in 1936, by prominent photographer and social reformer Lewis Hine. It was in the midst of the Great Depression at the time, and Hine was traveling around the country documenting its effects. He made a visit to Holyoke, where he photographed many of the mills, and he wrote the following caption about this scene:

Mt. Holyoke, Massachusetts – Scenes. The dam: The Connecticut River: the old and famous Hampshire bond manufacturing plant, recently bought by its neighbor, Carew Manufacturing. Also an old and independent mill; founder paternalistic enough to build a church which still stands, enough local feeling to employ from South Hadley because on the Hadley side of the River – Carew Manufacturing Company, 1936

As Hine mentioned in his description, the Hampshire Paper Company closed in 1935, and the property was acquired by the Carew Manufacturing Company. However, the old Hampshire mill was later owned by Stevens Paper Mills, Inc., and it stood here until it was demolished around 1970. In the meantime, the Carew mill was purchased by Texon in 1948, and it produced a variety of goods until it closed in 1986. The property was later sold to Holyoke Gas & Electric, but the historic mill stood vacant for many years before finally being demolished around 2012.

Today, all of the mills from the first photo are gone, but otherwise the scene is still easily recognizable from the first photo. The dam, which was completed in 1900, is still there, and it still provides hydroelectric power for the city of Holyoke. Further in the distance, Mount Tom still forms the backdrop of this scene, although it now features a number of broadcast transmitters atop the 1,202-foot summit. These are hardly visible in the 2017 photo, though, and the only other addition to this scene is the Joseph E. Muller Bridge, which carries U. S. Route 202 across the river just upstream of the dam.

Hadley Company Mills, Holyoke, Mass (2)

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The Hadley Company Mills, seen from the Route 116 bridge over the Third Level Canal in Holyoke, in 1936. Image taken by Lewis Hine, courtesy of the U. S. National Archives.

The scene in 2017:

As mentioned in the previous post, this mill complex was built starting in the late 1840s, and was originally owned by the Hadley Falls Company, which was responsible for developing Holyoke into a major industrial center. The company built the dam on the Connecticut River, along with the extensive canal system that powered the factories, including the Third Level Canal, which is seen here. In addition, the Hadley Falls Company built a large group of worker tenement houses, directly across the canal from this factory.

The canal system, along with many of the buildings that the Hadley Falls Company constructed, are still standing today. However, despite its profound influence in the history of Holyoke, the company proved to be very short-lived. The Panic of 1857, and the subsequent economic recession, hit the company hard, and in 1859 its assets were sold at auction. The company was literally sold for pennies on the dollar, with shareholders receiving just $1.32 for each $100 share, and its property was acquired by the Holyoke Water Power Company.

By 1863, this mill complex was used by the Hadley Company, a thread manufacturer that produced a variety of threads, yarns, and twine. It is hard to tell when each section of the facility was built, but the part in the left side – with the gabled roof and dormer windows – appears to have been the oldest section. The section on the right side does not appear in an 1853 map of Holyoke, but it was added by 1870. However, the top two floors have a different shade of bricks, suggesting that they may have been added at a later date.

The Hadley Company continued to produce thread here in this facility until 1898, when it was one of many thread manufacturers that were consolidated into the American Thread Company. It continued to be run as a division of American Thread for the next 30 years, but it closed in 1928, with about a thousand workers losing their jobs on the eve of the Great Depression. The first photo was taken only about eight years later, by prominent photographer and social reformer Lewis Hine. He documented life across the country during the Great Depression, including a visit to Holyoke, where he photographed a number of mills and their employees.

By the mid-20th century, the former Hadley Company mills were the home of Graham Manufacturing Company, which was later acquired by Johnson & Johnson. Today, the mill buildings on the property have several different owners, but the main building here on the canal has not seen many changes in more than 80 years since the first photo was taken. Overall, the only significant alterations to the exterior have been the loss of the cupola and the addition of what appears to be an elevator shaft, just to the left of the fire escape on the right side.