The Library Company recently acquired a collection of material relating to Philadelphia photographer William Nicholson Jennings (1860-1946). Some of our longtime shareholders may recall that back in 1978 we acquired 800 Jennings negatives and prints with funds from the Barra Foundation, and in 1981 we purchased from Jennings’ son additional original negatives, lantern slides, scrapbooks, and writings. Recently, Jennings family members decided to sell additional material, much of it more personal than our earlier acquisitions, and kindly contacted us to inform us of the upcoming internet auction. Several nerve-racking hours spent online yielded the happy result of our acquiring 115 new items.

William Jennings began professionally photographing in 1882. He enjoyed experimenting and in 1882 was the first to successfully photograph lightning. He also made views of Philadelphia from an untethered balloon in 1893, a preview of his later aerial work done for the Aero Service Corporation. With fellow Philadelphia photographer Frederic E. Ives he experimented with early color photography, although he never found financial success with that venture. Jennings’ major clients included the Pennsylvania Railroad and local construction firms for which he documented the erection of new buildings around the Delaware Valley, work well-represented in our existing Jennings collection.

Our new Jennings material ranges in date from 1881 through the 1920s and includes a large number of portraits of Jennings’ children and other family members. Jennings married quite late in life and did not become a father until he was in his mid-forties, when in the span of two years his wife Mary gave birth to twins, Sara and William, and their younger brother Ralph. Although William Jennings did not include portraiture as part of his professional photography work, he brought his photographic skills to the task of documenting his children as they grew. This collection includes photographs of the children from infancy through the time of Sara Jennings’ wedding in 1929.

Concern over the delicate health of their prematurely-born twins prompted the Jennings family to establish a vacation campsite outside Philadelphia. William Jennings took many of the photographs in this collection during the family’s summer camping trips in 1911, 1912, and 1913 to Fern Bank Camp along the Wissahickon Creek in Philadelphia’s Roxborough neighborhood. The sheer joy of running barefoot through a grassy field on a sunny day is beautifully captured in this photograph of the Jennings children. The children spent their days fishing, making small boats to sail in the creek, and exploring the wooded area while the adults found respite in hammocks stretched between trees and entertaining friends including members of the Columbia Camera Club. William Jennings also continued his photographic experiments, including taking this nighttime view of the main tent at Fern Bank Camp.

From bucolic scenes to wedding photographs to a large panoramic view of Philadelphia along the Schuylkill River, our new acquisition enhances our knowledge of the personal and professional life of William Jennings.

Sarah J. Weatherwax
Curator of Prints and Photographs