George R Lawrence was a pioneer whose specialty was panoramic aerial photography. A native of northern Illinois, he invented the means to take high-quality “bird’s eye” views using a camera hoisted aloft with balloons or kites. His most famous photographs are of a ruined San Francisco after the 1906 earthquake, but he also photographed Chicago, its waterfront and factories, and various towns nearby. Continue reading
Category Archives: Photography
It was a very good day for Charles M Schwab
An old photograph shows Charles M Schwab on top of the world.
True, the most recognizable figure in the photograph is President Woodrow Wilson, who looks down on Schwab from the platform of his special train car. The day is sunny. Wilson’s secret-service man and his second wife, Edith Bolling Galt Wilson, stand in the shadows. Something has just happened or is about to happen. A large floral arrangement leans against the train’s railing, its funny shape capped with a flamboyant bow.
Edith’s presence in what appears to be an official photograph (the widowed president married her on December 18, 1915) establishes that this photograph was taken no earlier than 1916. The carefree postures of the figures and their light-colored clothing indicate that it’s spring or summer. The president, always natty, is decked out in a light-colored suit and a boater. Summer it was—sometime between Memorial and Labor Day.
Though the president is bathed in light, charisma emanates from the homely yet somehow magisterial Charles M. Schwab (1862-1939). Here, with his back to the president—as though ignorant of his presence—, Schwab looks straight into the camera, his bluff exuberance setting the tone. He and his two unidentified companions share a joke, as if they posed with the president every day. Certainly, Schwab and the younger men exude solidarity, though he is evidently more powerful than they.
As for the young men themselves, what unconventional outfits they are wearing! The one on the left wears a tie with his overalls; the one on the right, though seemingly equally careless of his dress, wears a good striped dress shirt (without the customary collar or tie) under a smock-like jacket. No belt to the pants but two large buttons on his lapel. Are they campaign buttons? No, for they contain only numbers rather than words. They are more like badges, some sort of ID.
One more figure is implied the scene: Carl T. Thoner (1888-1938), the photographer, whose name is stamped on the photograph’s corner. Thoner worked for the war department, so this scene was part of Wilson’s presidency—pertaining to governing rather than running for office. Yet the fact that the photograph bears Schwab’s signature and later ended up in the Woodrow Wilson Presidential Library testifies to the personal significance the occasion had for both men.
When did the careers of Wilson and Schwab intersect? Schwab was one of the greatest industrialists of his time, a great steel man, self-made, a “master hustler,” some called him. He’d learned what he knew from the likes of J. P. Morgan and Andrew Carnegie.
Born in Pennsylvania, Schwab had worked his way up in Carnegie’s mills, becoming president of Carnegie Steel while in his thirties. After helping to found United States Steel Corporation and being its first president, he broke out on his own to take control of a smaller competitor, Bethlehem Steel. Under Schwab’s ownership, Bethlehem Steel became the one of the world’s largest and most important heavy-manufacturing concerns.
In Schwab, a deftness with finance and industrial relations combined with innovative ideas about how to make steel. He became great by perceiving the importance of the so-called I-beam, a product that, because of its great tensile strength, made possible skyscrapers, enormous ships, better bridges—all the emblems of modernity. Hitherto, steel had been made in shorter lengths, requiring more welding and lacking the I-beam’s versatility. By retrofitting his steel works around the beam’s production and more closely integrating steel-making more generally, Schwab increased Bethlehem’s annual sales from $10 million in 1904 to $230 million in 1916. In the process, Schwab became immensely wealthy, embracing philanthropic causes but also living in a recklessly lavish style.
As part of his corporate stewardship, Schwab developed one of the nation’s most successful early soccer teams. Founded in 1907, Bethlehem Steel Football Club hit its stride in 1913, winning a string of national championships thereafter, thanks in part to Schwab’s recruiting top talent from Scotland. Was the man standing next to Schwab a soccer player? The players, who worked in Schwab’s plants, were given time off to practice and travel to games.
No, the key to this photograph is Schwab’s appointment to head up the nation’s Emergency Fleet Corporation in the summer of 1918. World War I was wearing on, and the nation’s program to produce a large number of ships for the merchant marine was faltering. Schwab put his own life’s work on hold to move down to Philadelphia, where the government’s new Hog Island shipyard was located. There, he reinvigorated the nation’s shipbuilding program. The completion of the Quistconck (the subject of my previous post) in record time was attributed largely to Schwab’s energy and ability.
So, this photograph, like the one I wrote about previously, was taken at Hog Island, Philadelphia, on August 5, 1918. The president and his wife had come down from Washington by train for the day, where, at noon, they presided over the Quistconck’s christening. The men flanking Schwab are shipyard workers, one almost certainly the foreman MacMillan, who had driven the first rivet of the Quistconck on Feb 18, 1918, and was being celebrated at the christening as a near-hero. The many thousand workers who had worked on the ship each contributed a mite to buy an enormous bouquet of roses, which was presented to the First Lady that day.
This photograph records the Wilsons’ final moment at the shipyard, when, just before their train pulled away, the President leaned over to give his best to Charles M. Schwab.
Image from this source.
Christening the Quistconck
5 August 1918
There were no speeches, it being a hot day. So, with a minimum of ceremony, and before a crowd of some 60,000 people, the new First Lady Edith Bolling Galt Wilson, clumsily christened the new cargo ship, the champagne splashing off its hull and all over her lovely dress of lavender voile. A small detail lost in the excitement of the moment, as the enormous freighter slid down the ways under the gaze of dignitaries, the tens of thousands of shipyard workers who built her, and their families. Meanwhile Edith’s husband, the President Woodrow, suddenly boylike, waved his hat in the air and led the crowd in a riotous patriotic cheer. Bands played tinny airs, almost drowned out, while flags flapped in a sultry breeze.
It was a curious phase of WWI, with the long war nearly over and America’s concomitant shipbuilding effort only just then hitting its stride. After years of maintaining its neutrality, the United States had entered the war in the spring of 1917, partly in response to Germany’s relentless U-Boat attacks upon all trans-Atlantic shipping. It was another year before the US had embarked on an ambitious breakneck program to build a whole fleet of ships to replace the many US vessels that German submarines had destroyed. (Germany sank some 6.2 million tons of Allied and neutral ships in 1917 alone.)
One result of this determination was the overnight creation of the vast Hog Island shipyard on the outskirts of Philadelphia. Built on swampy outlying land (where the Philadelphia airport stands today), the shipyard consisted of 50 enormous bays. Covering 1.25 miles of land along the Delaware River, the yard, which 30,000 workers labored in harsh winter conditions to build, was the largest of any in the world. Though something of a boondoggle (the $50-million shipyard was essentially defunct by 1921), Hog Island was at the same time a source of great national pride, a proof of what American industry and a common sense of mission could together accomplish.
(Some scholars also credit Hog Island workers, who lived in an instant city and represented many food traditions, with giving the bulky sandwich known as the hoagie to the world.)
The Quistconck was the first vessel to be launched, of the hundreds that Hog Island was expected to produce. Though some of the ships were never built (the end of the war made them unnecessary), the Hog Island shipyard produced 248 5500-ton steel vessels over a two-year period, at the unprecedented rate of one every three to four days. The shipyard was innovative in applying standardized assembly-line techniques to shipbuilding, helping to restore and modernize the nation’s inadequate and sadly decimated merchant marine. Essential to any military effort abroad, many of these ugly supply vessels saw service in WWII.
Mrs Wilson, who had been married to the president for less than a year, was given the privilege of naming many of the vessels. Believing she was descended from Pocahontas and therefore a living representative of America’s indigenous nobility, Edith Wilson gave the ships Indian names. Quistconck was Hog Island’s native Delaware name.
The Quistconck’s christening celebrated the mobilization of a whole society around the national interests perceived to be in play during WWI. Whether or not this was the whole story of the shipyard, art and photography record the vigor of patriotic sentiment that kept the crowds cheering on that hot August day.
Top image from this source.
Poster by James Henry Daughetry, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
Click here to see other WWI shipbuilding posters on the website
of the American Merchant Marine at War.
E. B. Thompson: His Wives and Times
E.B. Thompson with unidentified boy, in front of an outbuilding on the grounds of George Washington’s birthplace. From the Historic Photographs Collection of the National Park Service.
For months now, I’ve been piecing together the biography of E. B. Thompson, an important early 20th-century photographer who spent the bulk of his career in Washington, DC. This post is a bare recitation of his vital facts, offered in the hope that anyone who knows more about Thompson or his family will contact me.
EARLY LIFE
Ezra Bowen Thompson was born in North Carolina in 1865, as the Civil War brought defeat to the Confederacy. His parents, Alfred Simeon Thompson and Anna Christophers, were both of Raleigh: he was a young dry-goods merchant, she the daughter of the city clerk. Ezra was their eldest child. The 1870 census found them with a daughter as well, living in a household that included their former slave, Charity Bobbett, and her 8 children. Alfred Thompson died the following year.
His widow remarried around 1875, combining her household, minus the Bobbetts, with that of widower Nathan Pope Holleman, a Civil War veteran a decade older than she. Anna and her children took the Holleman name, and by 1880 she was caring for 5 children: stepson Nathan A Holleman (17), her son E.B. (14), her 11-year-old daughter Daisy, and two children she had with Holleman: William H and Frank C, ages 4 and 1, respectively. Her husband told the census enumerator that year that his occupation was that of carpenter, though wounds he sustained while fighting for the Confederacy had cost him the use of his right arm.
The U.S. Capitol at night, from the E. B. Thompson Collection at the DC Public Library
ARRIVAL IN WASHINGTON
Ezra left home and headed for the national capital in the early 1890s, where he assumed the surname Thompson and eked out a living as a painter for several years. Sometime after 1900, however, he found work with the government as a photographer, an opportunity that founded his entire career. He worked for various branches of the Interior Department, photographing the new national parks on major expeditions. After 1911, he made his living by running a photographic supply store where he also sold his photographs as a retailer. Known professionally as E. B. Thompson, his full name and origins became hard to discover.
MARRIAGE TO SIGRID GUSTAFSON
In maturity, Thompson was married at least three times. His first wife was 30-year-old Sigrid Gustafson, whom he married in the District of Columbia on October 13, 1904. She was a gifted photographer known for her skill at altering photographs–retouching and splicing them to enhance their appeal. Did the Thompsons’ union produce a child? It’s hard to say. Sigrid died unexpectedly in December, 1905, while visiting her family in Jönköping, Sweden. Presumably she was buried abroad.
MARRIAGE TO NANCY ELIZABETH LITTLE
By 1910, Thompson had remarried. His second wife was Nancy Elizabeth Little, the daughter of R. A. Little and Lavantia Irvin Little. She was born in February 1871 in Wethersfield, Illinois. She was one of many children, whose forebears were known as early settlers of nearby Kewanee. By the time she married Thompson, however, Nancy, who sometimes went by Elizabeth, was a divorcée.
Her first husband was Delno Ernest Kercher (1869-1935), whom she married in Illinois on 26 September 1893. A graduate of Grinnell College, he was 24 years of age. He subsequently became a doctor, graduating from the University of Pennsylvania Medical School in 1895. The 1900 census finds Elizabeth and Delno Kercher living in Philadelphia with two boarders in the city’s 26th ward. Delno had begun practicing as an ob-gyn, a profession he continued in until his death. By 1910, Kercher reported his marital status as divorced, and his father David was living with him. The two are buried together at Arlington Cemetery in Drexel Hill, PA. David Kercher’s 1919 obituary noted that he had lived with his son for fifteen years (since 1904).
Nancy Elizabeth Little and Ezra Bowen Thompson were married sometime between 1905 and 1910, whether in Philadelphia, the District of Columbia, or somewhere else. At the time of the 1910 census, they are living as a couple in the capital, Ezra 44 years of age, Elizabeth 35. Her mother Lavantia, age 77, is with them, too. Was Elizabeth in ill health? She made her will in August 1910, and on the 18th of February, 1911, she, too, died. Thirty-six years of age, she was buried in Rock Creek Cemetery.
Elizabeth’s will was probated and its provisions reported in the Washington Herald. Elizabeth left just one dollar to each of her sisters and limited bequests to her mother and other siblings. The remainder of her estate she placed in trust to provide for her husband Ezra until he died or remarried. She directed that all her books, papers, and family portraits be returned to the family home in Kewanee.
MARRIAGE TO BLANCHE LOVE
On December 15, 1915, newspapers reported Thompson’s marriage to Blanche Love in New York City. Thirty-four years old, she was at least fourteen years younger than her new husband, who on their marriage license shaved a good five years off his age. She was born circa 1878 in Stafford, Virginia, the daughter of Ella M Coakley and Civil War veteran Charles H. Love. Blanche was one of a large family of children. At the time she married, Blanche was a resident of Washington, DC; and many members of her immediate family lived in or near the District for many decades. It is not known whether Blanche and EB had any children, but if they did, they might still be living.
Blanche Thompson with unidentified children at an outbuilding on the grounds of Mount Vernon. From the National Photographs Collection of the National Park Service.
Blanche Thompson sometimes appears in her husband’s photography. She accompanied him on trips. But she is not buried with him, and I have yet to discover anything about her later life.
RETURN TO NORTH CAROLINA
After his marriage to Blanche, Ezra continued living in the District of Columbia, at 1210 Euclid Avenue, NW, her former home. In the mid-1940s, he fell ill, decided to sell his photographic collection and retire. The District of Columbia Public Library bought some 2,000 glass-plate negatives from him for $1,000; today they form the backbone of the library’s collection of Washingtoniana. In the mid-1970s, the National Park Service acquired Thompson’s photographs of the national parks, recognizing the historical value of his life-work.
In the final years of his life, E. B. Thompson returned to North Carolina, where he died, in Burnsville, on April 20, 1951. He is buried in Oakwood Cemetery in Raleigh.
All photographs by or from E. B. Thompson.
Click on a picture to go to the source.
Please contact me if you wish to cite my work,
or if you have information about E. B. Thompson to share.
Author’s note (7/15): My post originally misidentified E. B. Thompson’s third wife.
She was not Blanche Edwards Love of New York City; she was not a widow with two children; and she was not older than EB.
If there was such a couple, they are not the subjects of this piece.
Many thanks to Denise Goff for establishing Blanche Love’s true identity.
Also, I originally wrote that “Since the 1900 census record for the Holleman family in North Carolina records the presence of a nine-year-old grandson, Ezra F Hollowman, it’s possible that E.B. had married and fathered a child before leaving home.” Now that I have learned much more about Thompson and the Holleman family, I am certain that that’s not the case. SB
The Real Thing
It bothers me that I can’t look at this photograph without thinking of Downton Abbey.
This is a historical photograph of a WWI convalescent ward set up in the town hall of Oxford, England. Strangely, though, memories of the fictionalized ward that featured in the BBC series now furnish my yardstick for judging its verisimilitude.
Image from this source.