The Persistence of “The Deserted Village,” Part 2

The Deserted Village: First Tourist Photos

This is the second in a series of posts on the Persistence of “The Deserted Village.” I’m thinking of it as “what’s in a name?” It’s an exploration of a “sense of place”—in this case, the sense of place which is imparted to the village variously called Feltville or Glenside Park by its most persistent name, “the Deserted Village.” It seems that the name and the place have somehow interacted, in some way unique to this specific place, turning physical separation from the public of the surrounding area—who knew what was going on there, in that abandoned industrial place—into a sense of pure desertedness, which in turn has helped to reinforce the separateness of the place. It is probably in large part the name “the Deserted Village” rather than Feltville or Glenside Park that draws thousands each year to come and contemplate the past lives of the village, with its Haunted Hayrides and its participation in the Union County event Four Centuries in a Weekend.

Oddly, it has only recently occurred to me to question the name so thoroughly, and it still feels a bit geeky. But I love how this has brought me into learning bits of history and past ways of life that I never would have suspected, and is leading me to constantly reconsider assumptions I have about the past.

“Feltville in 1876”

One of the artists and writers who arguably¹ to the fame of the place as “Deserted Village” was a nineteenth century photographer, Guillermo Thorn, whom I discovered through a bit of serendipity. It was at a time when I was new to my research work on the Deserted Village, and, in retrospect not asking most of what my current self would like to know—a great regret, since some of my early sources of interview information are no longer alive. But I already had the help of Daniel Bernier, whose passion for the village equaled mine, and who worked for Union County Parks (and who would later move into the village). At Dan’s behest, Union County had sent out a press release about my historical project, and people began contacting me with information.

Two of those people were Roger Hatfield, and his mother, Margaret Welden Hatfield. Margaret had been friends with Emilie Coles, who lived at Deerfield, in Scotch Plains. Emilie and her brother J. Ackerman Coles were niece and nephew to Warren Ackerman, also of Scotch Plains—and the person who converted the village into a resort in 1884. Neither Emilie nor J. Ackerman ever married, but lived out their lives in luxury in the family home in Scotch Plains. Roger’s mother teased my imagination with suggestions that the relationship of J. Ackerman and his secretary was something other than platonic. Perhaps that distraction can be my justification for what I now think of as failing to ask the right questions before Margaret died.

But right questions or not, chance was on my side, because in his huge collection of historic photographs, Roger had a number of stereographic photographs (stereographs) dated “Feltville 1876.” Thus was I introduced to Guillermo Thorn and his “Artistic Photo Views.”

On the reverse—“verso”—of almost all² the Feltville stereographs that Roger Hatfield had in his collection, Thorn’s description of Feltville is as follows:

Feltville, in a valley one mile to the north of Scotch Plains, is noted for its romantic beauty, its old mills, its Deserted Village, and a rift in the mountain side known as the Cataract. It has long been a favorite resort for picnic parties. ³

This told me that the identity of Feltville as the “Deserted Village” had been established at least by 1876. Here we find a series of photos providing the viewer with promises of romantic scenery (both a cataract and some old mills!), in a site where picnickers regularly congregated (more on picnics later). Best of all—it had a Deserted Village (which is listed as seemingly separate from the rest of the attractions).

The Feltville items were only a subseries in a much larger series that included views from two other communities. The entire series of photos apparently went through at least two printings or publications. These are identified in the original/first series on the front as “Views in Scotch Plains, Fanwood, and Feltville, N.J.” In the second series, the grouping is identified on the front as “Scotch Plains, Fanwood, and Feltville, N.J. Artistic Photo Views.” The verso of the second series photos is headed by a notation Series J., Second Edition. The photos that Roger Hatfield lent me for reproduction and use in my research project, included three selections from a longer complete list of Feltville photos on each printed verso:⁴ those titled Old Mill, Deserted Village, and From Bluff to Vale. Roger lent me two different versions of the view titled Old Mill, apparently one from each of the two printings/publication of the photos in the entire series.

Roger had an additional stereograph of Feltville, without any printed description on the back, but instead identified only as Vale of Desolation, Feltville, N.J. in two different handwritings.

Missing from Roger’s collection were the following additional Feltville items that Thorn listed as being in the same subseries: Weird Wildness, from the dam, Cataract, looking up, Cataract, looking down, and, in a second series, Addenda. The view with the handwritten note on the back is identified on the front with the notation “Gems” of Plainfield and Vicinity (quotation marks in original).

In the Scotch Plains subgrouping of both printings of the series is All Saints Protestant Episcopal Church, which has its own interesting reference to Feltville:

Built in 1883, of a fine shaded sandstone brought from Feltville. Interior finish of ash and California red wood. The chancel rail, of a dark chestnut wood, has this interesting history, that it was brought from St. Peter’s Church, Brooklyn, and before it some of the present members have been christened, confirmed, and married.

This church was not even built until a full seven years after the date on the Feltville group of photos: Feltville in 1876. Feltville is frozen in that year, while Scotch Plains and Fanwood, the other two communities pictured, are not, including later photos (each of the other two towns has at least one photo which is dated from 1877).

A Closer Look at the Feltville Photos (click on images for larger view)

There is such a wealth of questions these photographs raise. Who was Guillermo Thorn, and why would he have taken photographs of Feltville? These are clearly part of a series of tourist photos as the list of views on the verso of each photograph shows; Thorn would have wanted to make income from their production. Were these sold to individuals, or commissioned by the Central Railroad of New Jersey (mentioned on many of the photos)? If sold individually, who would have bought them, and why? Most of all, where would they have been sold, given that the Feltville of the time was at most a shadow of its former self, probably lacking any semblance of the active store which David Felt had maintained for his employees? I first took a closer look at some of the details of the photos themselves for clues.

Starting with stereograph designated as Deserted Village, the theme to this post, the view of Feltville which is depicted seems strikingly mundane. Three or perhaps four houses are shown, along with a piece of a white picket fence. Only the fence, missing a few slats, seems at all worse for wear. To my view, only a lack of people pictured with the houses shows any sense of desertion—and this could easily be by design, excluding any people who might have been there.

 

 

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A second view of buildings, probably the mill and an outbuilding, is in the item called From the Bluff to the Vale, which puts us looking down on these buildings from above. There are two stereographs with the title Old Mill, one apparently in each of the first and second series of the photographs. Again, as with the houses in Deserted Village, the mill buildings do not seem overly dilapidated. The final photo Roger lent me was the one entitled Vale of Desolation, with a bare tree in the right foreground, and evergreens on the left, framing a view through to a distant open space and more trees. As noted, this was not in either the first or second series of the other stereographs—but its notion that Feltville was a place of desolation, or at least had a Vale of Desolation, seems to go hand in hand with the notion of the Deserted Village, referenced in the Feltville in 1876 series. 

 

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Still, Feltville is the only location of all those pictured in the series that features three towns—Scotch Plains, Fanwood, and Feltville—that is noted as being a “favorite resort for picnic parties.” For the other two municipalities, Thorn describes charming scenery, private parks or a “prettily laid out” public park. He includes a view of at least two other mills, Seeley’s Paper Mills and the Fur Mills in Scotch Plains. The series of photos include a somewhat eclectic mix of other interest points, including all three churches in Scotch Plains, the train depot in Fanwood, some street scenes and other items which appear to have either historic or scenic appeal. Interestingly, by the second publication of the series, the Baptist Church of Scotch Plains had gained an additional three photographic representations in the series, for a total of seven—the most for any single attraction.

Scotch Plains and Fanwood were both long established communities. Scotch Plains was the site of European settlement as early as 1684. The Elizabethtown and Somerville Railroad, which later became the Central Railroad of New Jersey, built a Scotch Plains station in 1837. While Fanwood did not actually become an independently recognized municipality until 1878, it too had its own railway station, built in 1874. In 1876, the date placed on the Feltville photos, both Scotch Plains and Fanwood had thriving communities. In 1876, Feltville was a community in private hands, if indeed a community at all.

“It has long been a favorite spot for picnic parties.”

Certainly, Thorn’s description of Feltville as a “favorite resort for picnic parties” suggests that this it is perfectly appropriate to picnic there. What gave Thorn the notion that a piece of land, privately owned, was an appropriate place for a picnic party, or any other uninvited visit? Was this considered part and parcel of it being a “deserted village?” While Thorn mentions private parks in Scotch Plains, he never suggests that people can picnic there.

The ability to picnic at Feltville would become a source of conflict after 1882, when Warren Ackerman purchased the village, and turned it into a real resort, with paying overnight guests, not “a resort for [non-paying] picnic parties.” Would-be picnickers were sent away or kept away, causing great disgruntlement. Future posts on the redevelopment of Feltville as the resort Glenside Park will discuss both the development of the resort and the resultant status of picnics further.

My colleague Carissa Scarpa , sent me an article written by Alexander Lee, a fellow in the Centre for the Study of the Renaissance at the University of Warwick for History Today. Mr. Lee had traced the history of picnics, which originated as indoor affairs, not outdoors. In France, their birthplace, the first described picnic was an event which seems characterized by gluttony. Within 50 years or so, picnics were an established form of upper class gathering, with a kind of potluck requirement that picnic attendees contribute either food or money.⁵ As picnics began to be held outdoors, they took on some sense of being less than genteel, as suggested graphically by the picnic depicted in Edouard Manet’s Le Dejeuner sur L’Herbe (1862-3). When the picnic crossed from Europe to the United States, it seems to have been a strictly outdoor event, without the apparent extra suspicion of decadence which had developed in Europe.

Development of Stereographs

Beyond the examination of the individual photographs are questions about the photography involved, which clearly was not accomplished by smartphone. What was required to do outdoor photography in 1876? How were stereographs produced?

Of course, I quickly found that these questions could catapult me into a study of—and, potentially, a treatise on—the history of photography. I include some really brief notes here, created from the point of view of what I personally found relevant to this post (for those interested in a more complete history of photography, independent of the current discussion regarding Feltville, there is a list of books at the end of the post, recommended by Gary Saretzky, who will be discussed below).

The development of photography was based on experimentation into the camera obscura, which concentrated rays of light filtered through a lens to create a reversed, upside-down image. In the early nineteenth century, various individuals were working, often independently, to find the means to make the images from something which had been recognized for centuries into permanent images, recorded on materials including metal, glass or paper. Most of the processes created relied on creation of an intermediate negative or image, which could then be used with controlled light in a darkroom atmosphere to create a positive image on a surface which had been pretreated with light sensitive chemicals (most often containing silver), and often relying on use of vapors of iodine or mercury.⁶

The history of photography includes developments in photographic equipment supposedly tied to one or another individual, notably Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre, who worked very hard to get the recognition of having created the first photograph, a Daguerreotype. In her book Photography A Cultural History, published in Historian Mary Warner Marien is quite insistent, however, that photography was being simultaneously invented and developed by various individuals:

The notion of simultaneous invention—that two or more people can develop the same concept at about the same time—was mentioned by [Antoine Hércules Romauld] Florence and by another of photography’s pioneers, William Henry Fox Talbot (1800-1877) . . . Simultaneous invention makes it difficult to construct a linear chronology of photography and suggests, moreover, that there may have been other successful yet unknown attempts to invent photography. If Florence, living in a remote area, could originate a way to reproduce labels using a light-sensitive compound, others elsewhere in the world may have had similar partial success. It is probable that, while the work of individuals like Florence will become better known, the precise history of photography’s invention will never be fully ascertained.

Additionally, it seems certain that that individual practitioners, including Guillermo Thorn, continued to tinker with their own equipment, making improvements which have not necessarily been recorded or noted.⁷

I grew up with the plastic View-Master of the 50s and 60s, that allowed you to put a round cardboard piece fitted with little slides into the View-Master, and click through a series of 3 dimensional images in color. The ones I remember showed places like the Grand Canyon. Thorn’s stereographs preceded these, working on a similar principal, that two images of the same scene, taken a few inches apart, would produce a seemingly three-dimensional image in your brain. Stereographic images featured two nearly identical photos of the same scene, side by side. Each image was captured from a point 2 ½ inches from the other—a distance meant to approximate the different vantage point of left and right eyes in humans. The images were viewed through a piece of equipment called a stereograph, so that each eye saw the different image, and put them together to “see” something three dimensional.

Each of our eyes sees a slightly different image, and the two images are synthesized by our brains to give us a three-dimensional view on the world. In 1838, a study by Sir Charles Wheatstone documenting this phenomenon was published by the Royal Society in London. His study included drawings meant to simulate the different views from each eye, which could be viewed in an instrument Sir Charles dubbed a stereoscope. The stereoscope allowed the viewer to see an apparently three-dimensional image.

Photography proved to be the ideal way to create the separate images needed, rather than the exacting art that hand drawing would have required. Here, still, it proved to be difficult to simply take two photos from slightly different spots—so special twin-lens cameras were invented and perfected, with the lenses set at 2 ½ inches apart, the distance calculated to be the normal distance between two human eyes. These cameras became quite common by the early 1860s, and the demand for the resulting stereographs—and the stereoscopes to view them—became great. Stereoscopes allowed the viewer to fit your eyes snugly against the two individual viewing sides, and block out anything but the two carefully produced views. The viewer could feel themselves to be in a kind of mini theater.

Guillermo Thorn and his Artistic Photo Views

Gary Saretzky, a historian and photographer himself, has done extensive study of the rise of photography—and of photographers—in New Jersey. Mr. Saretzky notes that “most early practitioners were professional portrait photographers. The invention of photography opened a huge market for portraits because most people could not afford to hire a professional portrait painter.”⁸ Mr. Saretzky has helped me understand the processes Thorn might have used to create his stereographs of Feltville.

Saretzky describes Guillermo Thorn ((1837-1920) as “a Quaker from the Catskills based in Plainfield, [and] the leading Union County photographer from the early 1860s to 1910.” Thorn was the subject of Victorian New Jersey: Photographs by Guillermo Thorn from the Kean University Collection, by Dr. Frank Esposito and Dr. Donald Lokuta, published in 2005. In that book, Drs. Esposito and Lokuta describe Thorn as growing up during the infancy of photography, and, having discovered photography in this time, turning to it almost immediately as a career. He settled in Plainfield, New Jersey in 1864, at a time when that city, as well as most of the surrounding area, were popular vacation spots. The growth of multiple railroads allowed “excursionists” and longer term vacationers alike to travel more easily—and, of course, made the places most accessible from the railroad especially attractive to the would be vacationers. The railroads themselves were quick to capitalize on this, commissioning photographs and guidebooks to help nudge vacationers onto their service, on their way to vacation spots.

As noted, Thorn’s series of photographs of Feltville are dated (by him) as being taken in 1876. It is also in this year that the Victorian New Jersey, at pp. 13-14, indicates that Thorn did a series of photographs of scenes along the Central Railroad of New Jersey. Likely the Feltville photos originated with this commission, although the only photo referencing the Central Railroad among those provided to me by Roger Hatfield is the one with the handwritten verso note, Vale of Desolation. On its front, framing the photo on one side are the printed words: “Gems” of Plainfield and Vicinity Central R. R. of N. A later Central Railroad sponsored guidebook, Gustav Kobbe’s Central Railroad of New Jersey, published in 1890 also featured Feltville, “once romantically known as the “Deserted Village,” and now “a pretty place of residence called Glenside;” this seems to indicate an ongoing interest in using Feltville as an attraction by the Central Railroad of New Jersey.

Although he also did portraits, it is likely that Thorn’s greatest love was doing what he called “Artistic Photo Views” like those of Feltville, including many featuring Plainfield, New Jersey, where he had a studio for many years, and of the countryside surrounding it. Thorn early developed a dedication to his art that included long trips with a wagon that carried the heavy and cumbersome portable camera and darkroom equipment and supplies necessary to take and process photos away from an established studio. In1876, the date Thorn identifies as having been the date of production of the Feltville grouping, Mr. Saretzky indicates Thorn would have needed a covered wagon serving as darkroom. Mr. Saretzky indicates that just before shooting each pair of sterographic photos, Thorn would have coated and sensitized two collodion wet plate glass negatives and loaded them into his dual lens camera. The camera would then be mounted on a tripod, and the photos shot. The resulting negatives had to be developed in the same portable covered wagon darkroom, before they dried. Thus, Thorn would have needed all the chemicals and glass plates to make as many glass negatives as he was intending to shoot on that excursion. 

The negatives could be taken back to make albumen prints—so called because the paper on which the prints were made came pre-coated with egg white—albumen. This paper too had to be pre-sensitized by Thorn, by floating each piece of paper upside down in a bath of silver nitrate. After the paper was sensitized and dried (by hanging up), it could be used to make prints for a few days. Prints were made outdoors, calculating exposure time according to the amount of sunlight or cloudiness of the day, and more chemicals were made to fix the image and make it more permanent. Finally, the images were mounted side by side on cardstock.

The viewers which allowed people to view the stereographs used ambient light. Mr. Saretzky indicates that there one could procure either handheld viewers that allowed feeding of only one stereograph at a time, or could purchase table top boxes that held multiple stereographic cards, with a handle for advancing from one to the next. Mr. Saretzky explains: “The stereograph, with its pair of images viewed through a stereoscope, created a dynamic three-dimensional spatial illusion that increased its marketability.”

Art or Simply Realistic Representation

Stereographs are an example of the emerging obsession with photography, a form of art—or technology—still in its infancy during the nineteenth century. The demand for photographs, which allowed multiple copies of the same image, was perhaps most driven by the growth of the middle class. Photographs of landscapes, in particular, allowed members of the public to see scenes both near and far, mundane and exotic. Even though photographers composed their photographs, in ways slightly different than was possible with painting or drawing, landscape photographs could seem to be simply a realistic representation of the scene depicted—perhaps not art at all. Beaumont Newhall in The History of Photography, shows that the controversy over whether photography constituted art became even more hair splitting.

It is remarkable that throughout its history stereography has not appealed to photographers as an artistic medium. Its very virtue, that of creating an astonishing illusion of depth, is felt to be too close to reality. J. Craig Annan, a leader in the pictorial movement, remarked in 1892:

The stereoscopic effect is an endeavor to imitate nature, while the object of an ordinary photograph, or drawing is only to reproduce an impression of nature. The failure of the stereoscope in its greater aim is more marked than the less ambitious but more practical endeavour to reproduce on a flat surface an impression of what we see.⁹

Of course, this was years after Thorn’s had proclaimed his stereographs to be “Artistic Photo Views” or “artistic gems.”

Further reading:

A selection of books recommended by Mr. Saretzky for those looking for a general introduction to the history of photography can be found below; these books and a wide range of others on every aspect of photography may be purchased through Mr. Saretzky’s website, at https://store.saretzky.com/.

Naomi Rosenblum, A World History of Photography
Mary Warner Marien, Photography: A Cultural History
Robert Hirsch, Seizing the Light: A Social History of Photography
Beaumont Newhall, The History of Photography from 1839 to the Present
Michel Frizot, ed., A New History of Photography