Sepia Saturday 221: The Photo Boat

Travelling photographers catered for quite a different section of the portrait trade from those who had established studios in larger towns. The population of smaller towns and villages just didn't generate enough business to keep a full time permanent studio viable year round. In order to make ends meet, the photographer who either lived in or wished to cater to a small town needed to either find extra work in an alternative trade, or travel further afield in search of customers.

In previous articles here on Photo-Sleuth I have written about several of these itinerant tradesmen who worked in Derbyshire, England: "Professor" Frank Simpson, Charles Tyler and Charles Warwick all owned caravans and toured the countryside, often following the circuit of summer fairs.


J.B. Silvis' U.P.P.R. Photograph Car
Image © and courtesy of Richard D. Sheaff
In North America the rapid settlement of vast expanses of land in the late nineteenth century meant that practitioners who wished to ply their trade there needed to be inventive. Much of the expansion took place along the network of railroads, it is therefore not surprising that railroad photographers set up business to service these disparate communities. The most famous of these was perhaps John B. Silvis, proprietor of the Union Pacific Rail Road car, who took portraits and sold stereoscopic and other landscape views along the Union Pacific and other companies' railway tracks from 1870 until 1882.


F.E. Webster's Dental and Photo Boats, Lake Charles, Calcasieu, Louisiana
Mounted paper print, 204 x 153mm
Image © and courtesy of Jana Last
In parts of the United States, however, communities were linked by waterways rather than roads or railways. Many tradespeople serviced their customers from riverboats, but I had never come across a photographic studio housed on one until I saw this image shared by Jana Last on her family history blog. Jana's maternal great-grandfather Frederick Emory Webster (1864-1946) graduated from the Western Dental College, Kansas City, Missouri in April 1896. Some time during the next decade he appears to have operated a dental surgery from the boat shown at centre in the photograph above which, according to the handwritten caption, is on the shore of Lake Charles in Louisiana.


Detail of F.E. Webster's Photo Boat, Lake Charles, Calcasieu, Louisiana
Moored alongside is an almost identical craft with a sign reading "F E WEBSTER PHOTO BOAT." (Click on the image above for more detail.) That it does indeed house a photographic studio seems quite plausible, as the end of the boat closest to shore has large windows and a special skylight with pitched roof which I believe was the actual room where portraits would have been taken.


F.E. Webster's Dental and Photo Boats, unknown location
Mounted paper print, 202 x 124mm
Image © and courtesy of Jana Last
Jana has at least two more photographs of her great-grandfather's boats, although the photographer's studio has now been replaced by the premises of an optician. That the same boat was converted from studio to eye-testing rooms, and presumably a dispensary (or how would he have made a living, since the eye-tests were advertised as free?), is fairly certain because the characteristic skylight is still just visible in both photographs.

In fact, the Photo Boat may have been Webster's first craft, as the name painted on the prow appears to read "F.E. Webster No. 1," while that on the dental boat is quite clearly "No. 2." I've not been able to decipher the caption fully (it is written in either Portuguese or Galician, in neither of which I am proficient), but it appears to state that the floating theatre is towed by the steamboat with two smokestacks.


Detail of F.E. Webster's Dental & Photo Boats, Lake Charles, Louisiana
That steamboat appears to be a different one from that in the first photograph taken at Lake Charles (see detail above). Judging from the apparent lack of paddles or smokestacks on the floating studio and surgery, they were not self-propelled, but rather barges towed by a paddle steamer. It's not clear whether Webster owned his own steamer, or whether he just hired one to tow the two barges whenever they had exhausted the opportunities for business in one location and wanted to move to another. However, I did note that the steamboat superstructure also has "Photographer" signwritten on the wheelhouse.


F.E. Webster's Dental and Optical Boats, Natchez, Mississippi
Mounted paper print, 205 x 153mm
Image © and courtesy of Jana Last
The caption on the third photograph indicates that it was taken at Natchez, Mississipi. Locations in FE Webster's timeline show a general migration south, away from his former residences in Stockton (Kansas) and Kansas City (Missouri), down first the Missouri River and then the Mississippi, although since none of the photographs are accurately dated it is difficult to be precise about his movements. By April 1899, when he was granted a patent for a dental handpiece, and shortly after the granting of a divorce from his first wife, he gave his address as "Clarendon, Monroe, Arkansas." It may have been an address of convenience, perhaps that of his lawyer, as presumably he was on the move much of the time.


Portrait of Cynthia Maria Webster née Waterman (1834-1895)
taken by The F.E. Webster Photo Boat, c.1894-1897
Albumen print (47 x 61mm) mounted on printed card (60 x 77mm)
Image © and courtesy of Jana Last
Jana is also very fortunate to have a portrait taken F.E. Webster's Photo Boat studio. Although identified as the photographer's mother, who died in September 1895, I think it's possible it might be the portrait of one of her daughters. Whoever it is, we can see from the card mount that it was produced on the boat, and I believe from the wide sleeves worn by the subject that it was taken in the mid-1890s.


Frederick (Watson) Emory Webster (1864-1946), taken c.1890-1896
Cabinet card print by David P. Thomson of Kansas City, Missouri
Image © and courtesy of Jana Last
Webster, pictured here in Kansas City while he was studying to be a dentist or on his graduation, may not have lasted very long in the photograhic trade, but his choice of studio was pretty unusual. I've not yet found evidence of any other portrait photographer using this mode of transport, although there may well have been some.


Doremus' Mississippi Views Photograph Gallery, c.1870s
J.P. Doremus was a portrait photographer from Patterson, New Jersey, who in 1874 constructed a floating photographic studio which he used to travel down the Mississippi:

... from St Paul, Minnesota to the Gulf of Mexico photographing steamboats, waterfronts, bridges, lumberyards, log rafts, and river towns. Doremus would then convert these images to stereo card views which he described in a short work entitled "Floating Down the Mississippi" (1877).

While there are plenty of extant stereoviews by Doremus, there is no evidence that he took any portraits in this studio. Perhaps Webster's studio was one of a kind.

I'm very grateful to Jana Last for the opportunity to use these photographs from her private collection. Thanks also to Dick Sheaff for the use of one of his fine images. You may or may not find similar modes of water transport in this week's Sepia Saturday contributions, but I can guarantee that there will be plenty of interesting images.

Post Script 31 March 2014

Mike Brubaker has very kindly drawn my attention to a collection of photographs of Photo Studio Boats on the Cincinnati & Hamilton County Public Library web site, which demonstrates that Mr Webster's venture was not the only one of its kind. From this page, I extracted details of the following:
- Williams Photo Boat, Sistersville, West Virginia, 1896-1900, and on the Muskingum River, Marietta, Washington County
- H.O. Schroeter's Floating Photo Studio, Green River, Kentucky, 1900
- Doremus Photo Gallery No.1 named Success and No. 2 named Flora
- Thornton Barrette's Photograph Boat, Russell, Ky., 1899-1900
- Little Gem Floating Pictures, unknown location and date
- Eureka Photo, unknown location and date
Clearly more research can be done on this topic.

Post Script 14 March 2021

A further communication gratefully received from Gary Saretzky has shed much more light on the fascinating activities of John P. Doremus and his floating Photograph Gallery between 1874 and 1881:

You mentioned lack of evidence that Doremus took any portraits on his floating gallery. There are frequent mentions in his diary that he did and I’ve seen examples of a tintype and a cabinet card, although these portraits seem to be quite uncommon compared to his stereo views taken on his travels down the river from 1874 into the 1880s.  Excerpts from his diary are available online in Stereo World 30:5 and the entire diary from March 1874 to the end was published in S. & D. Reflector in sections from March 1992 to December 1993, also available online.  Doremus did not take all the portrait himself as he had a camera operator as well as other staff.  When he was away from the boat for an extended period, he let his operator continue taking portraits for a percentage of the gross.  The quality of the portraits I have seen are not impressive and I suspect those were taken by his operator.  On one occasion mentioned in his diary, he got into a physical fight with an unsatisfied inebriated customer.

References

Last, Jana (2014) The F. E. Webster Dental and Photo Boats, Jana's Genealogy and Family History Blog, 3 February 2014.

J.P. Doremus, on the Mississippi River Museum & Aquarium web site.

Stereoviews by J.B. Doremus, from George Eastman House.