Sign up to receive email notices of recent acquisitions.

[Photo Album Documenting a Tour of the Southern United States and Cuba].

ca. 1901. Oblong 4to, detached remnants of brown paper covers. 335 silver print photographs on 99 leaves, most with manuscript captions.

An extensive album documenting the people and places of the Southern United States and Cuba.

This ample photo album records a tour through the southern United States and Cuba at the turn of the century. The unknown but clearly white photographer, as certain racist inscriptions reveal, begins in Richmond and visits Charleston, Savannah, Jacksonville, Daytona, St. Augustine, South Beach, the Ocklawaha River, Miami, and other southern locales, as well as Cuba, documenting the notable buildings and monuments of each place, as well as place-specific curiosities and inhabitants. In Savannah, for example, in addition to the “Cotton Exchange” building, “Water Street,” the “Jewish Synagogue,” and other architectural features, are some truly wonderful life scenes of work and leisure “along the wharf”: men “unloading [long lumber] from R.R. cars,” a young man and a boy “Negotiating for a Loan,” and a woman in a shawl “Selling baked sweetpotatoes [sic] to Niggers on wharf.” Moving south by train, this careful photographer documents the engine, the tracks and stations at various points, and several railroad bridges “Along The Atlantic Coast Line,” as well as a small general store plastered with tobacco ads and clusters of dilapidated shacks along the railway. In Jacksonville we find a 125 year old alligator assured his peace by a nearby sign, “DO NOT MOLEST THE ALLIGATORS,” two men “Hitching up for a spin” on an ostrich-drawn sulky, a group of black boys “Playing the National Game” (delightful images of classic sandlot baseball), and “Phoenix Park,” where the signs read: “private,” “for whites only.”

This rich mixture of architectural and human portraits continues throughout the album as the photographer captures buildings and monuments of note, both alone and surrounded by their inhabitants: nuns walking across a square, white folks leaving an Episcopal Church, a group of black women in white dresses—“Four of a kind,” the caption reads—resting and talking in Plaza de la Constitucion in St. Augustine. He captures a striking vision of “Cattle on the shore” at South Beach, records “scenes of Logging” along the Ocklawaha River, and on a page labeled “Miami” are candid as well as posed shots of “Seminole Indians From The Everglades”—men in their decorative full-cut shirts and women and girls in ruffled, patterned skirts and long-sleeved, short-cropped blouses, their necks laden with countless strings of beads. Approximately 20 photos near the close of the album depict various locations in Cuba, including a shot of the Colon Cemetery gates and another of grave diggers within, and a picture of “Where Sailors of the Maine were buried.”

A vivid portrait of the South at the turn of the century: its people, industry, pass-times, and scenery.

CONDITION: Heavy chipping at edges, spine perished though binding intact, first and last several leaves as well as covers detached.

Item #3916

Sold