Curator’s Favorite: Webster Family Photographic Negative Collection
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.
![Fig. 1. John H. Webster, Jr., [Stouton, Webster family residence, Kensington and Indiana Avenues, Philadelphia, Pa.], ca. 1890. Glass plate negative.](http://librarycompany.org/wp-content/uploads/cfav_03a-1-800x491.jpg)
Fig. 1. John H. Webster, Jr., [Stouton, Webster family residence, Kensington and Indiana Avenues, Philadelphia, Pa.], ca. 1890. Glass plate negative.
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.
![Fig. 2. John H. Webster, Jr., [Men harvesting hay on the Stouton farm, with row homes in the distance, Philadelphia, Pa.], ca. 1890. Glass plate negative.](http://librarycompany.org/wp-content/uploads/cfav03_b-2-800x459.jpg)
Fig. 2. John H. Webster, Jr., [Men harvesting hay on the Stouton farm, with row homes in the distance, Philadelphia, Pa.], ca. 1890. Glass plate negative.
Linda Wisniewski, Graphics Assistant