Improvements in photographic negatives and cameras in the 1880s eliminated cumbersome portable darkrooms and made photography accessible to untrained, middle-class amateurs. These casual photographers recorded people, events, and sites that were personally important, and created intimate photos for their own use. Nineteenth-century amateur photographs often commemorate family milestones, document excursions into the countryside, and capture people, places, and scenes from everyday life.

This is certainly true of the 131 glass plate negatives created by surveyor John Hambleton Webster, Jr. (1861-1934). Donated to The Print and Photograph Department in 1990 by his grandson, Henry Coleman Webster, the collection features informal group portraits of his large Quaker family on their homesteads, along with a handful of bridges and other engineering projects undertaken by the Webster brothers, also surveyors. The collection is a rich resource for those interested in the mostly-obsolete 19th-century landscape of the Aramingo and Frankford neighborhoods of Philadelphia, as well as small towns in Delaware County, Pennsylvania.

This image shows the colonial residence and birthplace of the photographer, a civil engineer and surveyor for the city of Philadelphia (fig. 1). Known as Stouton, or the Webster Mansion, the home was constructed as the country estate for Continental Army officer William MacPherson. The Webster family inhabited and farmed the surrounding parkland, now known as MacPherson Square, from 1805 until about 1891. Images of the photographer’s brother driving a horse-drawn plow, haystacks piled in an open field, and crude, wooden outbuildings seem anachronistic against the backdrop of encroaching row houses and smokestacks (fig. 2). Not long after these photographs were taken, the city of Philadelphia acquired the property in 1891 and converted the residence into a library in 1898.

Twenty years later, steel magnate Andrew Carnegie donated $40,000 for the construction of a new library building on the site. A debate quickly ensued about the historical significance of Stouton and whether the house should be preserved. Local neighborhood groups, like the Aramingo Society of Historical Research, claimed that the mansion was the only remaining historical landmark in the Aramingo district. Others protested the modern library building to oppose Andrew Carnegie (who was considered by some in the working-class neighborhood as the “enemy”) rather than because of any real wish to maintain the historical site. Despite resistance, the mansion was demolished and the new Carnegie Library was constructed in 1915 after designs by Wilson Eyre & McIlvaine (fig. 3). Fortunately, through Webster’s photographs, images of MacPherson Square before Stouton’s total demolition still survive.

Linda Wisniewski, Graphics Assistant