The Elegant Guitarist

 

The guitar is a versatile instrument.
It can be played solo
or in a group
by contributing melody,
accompaniment,
or both.

It's a very tactile instrument, too.
The guitar's strings and fretboard 

invite fingers to touch it
and make a sound
that vibrates the wooden body.

Whether strummed or picked,
chords and arpeggios
come naturally to the guitar
and create music
that is intimate and personal.

It's also lightweight and very portable
which makes it easy to make music anywhere.

Today a modern guitar can easily rock a stadium
with its amplification turned up to eleven,
but in earlier non-electric times it was known 
only in its acoustic form,
a shapely classical instrument
with a warm quiet tone.

 

Today I present
three vintage photographs
of young women who enjoyed
playing the guitar. 

 

My first guitarist posed for her portrait seated with her instrument in playing position. She wears a dark satiny dress made with tight sleeves and collar and a generous amount of material for the skirt. She looks about age 21 to 30 years old with attractive features of a high society woman of the 1880s. I can't say very much about her instrument except that the guitar's body seems smaller than most modern acoustic guitars. The ribbon bow tied to the headstock gives it a light-hearted style.  The photo has no annotation so the woman's name is unknown. Her dress and hair style fits with fashions of the late 1880s and early 1890s. 

Her photograph was taken at the studio of W. Kurtz in New York City at Madison Square & 233 Broadway. The back of the photo has the Kurtz business mark advertising its 12 first class medals from New York, Vienna, Paris, and Philadelphia. The bottom imprint of Branch 233 Broadway  likely means the photo came from that studio which was located, I think, on Broadway across from City Hall park just two blocks up from St. Paul's Chapel. 

The proprietor of this studio was Wilhelm or William Kurtz (1833 – 1904) , a German-American photographer and illustrator. He is recognized as a pioneer in the development of halftone and color printing for reproducing photographs. Kurtz was born in Hesse, Germany in 1833 and as a young man trained to be a lithographer. However after serving his compulsory two years of military service he lost his apprenticeship and left Germany to seek his fortune. 

He first traveled to England where he joined the British German Legion and fought in the Crimean War. After surviving that war he set off for China only to be shipwrecked off the Falkland Islands. He was rescued and taken to New York City where he found work in a photography studio. When the American Civil War started Kurtz enlisted in the New York Seventh Regiment and managed to survive that conflict, too. 

William Kurtz photograph gallery, circa 1885
Source: New York Public Library Archive

Returning to New York he went back to work as a photographer and in 1873 opened his own studio on East 23rd Street opposite Madison Square. The building was five stories tall and Kurtz's studio was on the top floors to take advantage of window lighting. Later his studio was one of the first to introduce electric lights. In this illustration his studio is covered in advertising promoting his name, but it is interesting that he shared the building with the Remington Sewing Machine Co., too.

William Kurtz became very successful making portraits of New York's society people and theater and literary celebrities. The last decades of the 19th century were a time when photographs became a very popular medium largely because innovations in photo printing allowed them to be reproduced in great numbers. It's quite possible that this guitarist's photo is a souvenir photo of a well-known actress or socialite but without more clues she will have to remain anonymous.

 * * *

My second and third guitarists appeared together as a duo on the same cabinet card photograph. Both wear fine dresses of a dark color with tight sleeves but modestly puffy shoulders, a fashion that dates from the early to mid 1890s. The girl on the left seems rather young, perhaps 14 to 18 years old maybe, while the woman on the right it closer to age 22 or 30. They might be sisters but they don't share many facial features so I'm inclined to think this is a photo of a student and teacher. Their guitars are small like the previous woman's instrument. The girl on the left has a capo across the fretboard to transpose her strings to a higher key. 

This photo is in remarkably perfect condition with a high gloss finish that makes it look as if it was taken yesterday. It has none of the surface abrasion or faded contrast that I usually find in antique photos of this period. The photographer was F. T. Bannister of New Richmond, Wisconsin. His business imprint on the back announces that "Pictures like this may be had at any time, for $2.00 per dozen, after the first dozen."  For this kind of quality that sounds like quite a deal.

The photographer's name was Frank Truman Bannister. Courtesy of one of his descendants who posted his family tree on Ancestry.com, I learned he was born in 1854 in Rome, Michigan. In 1888 Frank Bannister set up his own photography shop in New Richmond, Wisconsin with a specialty in "General Viewing of Railroads, Bridges, Mills, Residencies, Life-size Photographs, Fine India Ink and Crayon Portraits." 

New Richmond is in St. Croix County, Wisconsin about 40-35 miles northeast of Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota. In the 1890s it was a thriving small town of about 1,500 residents that served a larger region of farms and timberlands. 

On Monday, 12 June 1899, New Richmond was welcoming many visitors because the Gollmar Bros. Circus was in town. The weather was not ideal and the afternoon brought heavy rain with hail that spoiled the show, but by suppertime the rain let up and people began heading back to their homes and to the town's center.  

Suddenly the sky grew very menacing with flashes of lightning and rumble of thunder. Within seconds a tornado touched down near the southwest corner of the town in a residential neighborhood where many of New Richmond's prosperous families lived. In an instant over fifty homes were destroyed. 

The tornado then rapidly advanced on the town's central business district where many people had sought refuge in the stone and brick commercial buildings. Yet these masonry structures were no defense against this tornado's monstrous energy and fury. All were demolished killing many people sheltering inside. In moments it hit the circus grounds, shredding the tents and killing a few horses and an elephant. The town of New Richmond was almost completely obliterated and hundreds perished with many more injured. 

Minneapolis Tribune
13 June 1899

The 1899 New Richmond cyclone was estimated as an F5 tornado, the most  powerful kind with the highest velocity winds. That evening of June 12th it ripped a 45-mile path of devastation through St. Croix, Polk, and Barron counties in west-central Wisconsin. Within New Richmond and the surrounding area 117 people were killed, and at least  twice as many more were injured. Hundreds were left homeless. The wind peeled the bark off trees. Houses were totally destroyed. Damaged tanks of flammable material caught fire setting off a secondary wave of destruction. This next image taken the next day shows only part of the damage. It was clipped from a larger panoramic photo that gives a better view of this terrible tragic event.

Elevated view of New Richmond after the tornado hit on June 12, 1899.
The Willow River is visible in the foreground.
Source: Wisconsin Historical Society image 61758

Reports on the destruction of New Richmond continued through the week as the world learned of the horrendous disaster. Mr. Bannister's business appeared in one account which was repeated in several newspapers around the country.

        The people are still so dazed that, with few exceptions, the bereaved ones evince no grief or apparent emotion.   This gives the impression of indifference, but physicians say they are so dazed by the disaster that they do not realize its extent or their losses of friends and property.  One old man was looking over the ruins of Bannister's photograph gallery.  In answer to a question as to what he was looking for he replied, in a perfectly indifferent manner:

        "Oh, I was just looking for a picture of my wife and children.  They were all killed and my house went, too."

        This is a fair sample of the state of mind every one is in who lost part of or all they possessed.  Money and supplies are coming in constantly, but as far as money is concerned, it is not enough to give the desolate town anything like a new start.  It is problematic whether or not this once thriving community will rise from its ashes, or rather debris, and attain the prosperity which prevailed before it was demolished.

A few weeks later in another newspaper, Mr. Bannister told a reporter that he had begun building three small buildings to restart his photography business. By the 1910 census Frank T. Bannister listed his occupation as photographer and included his eldest son, also named Frank, in the business. He died in 1919 at age 65. 

 * * *

My third photo and fourth guitarist is posed standing in a photographer's studio while leaning her head on her instrument's headstock. This is not how you tune a guitar. She wears dark skirt with a a loose blouse made of a broad crisscross pattern satiny fabric with big puffy shoulders. That fashion and her hair tied into a top knot, (along with the ornate rattan chair, too) are a typical style of the late 1890s. Her direct gaze at the camera also gives her a subtle provocative quality that is not common in photos of this era. Her guitar is similar to the others but has a darker varnish. 

The photographer was E. E. Spracklen of 101,103 & 105 Allen St. in Webb City, Missouri. Webb City is located in the southwest corner of Missouri, west of Springfield and near the border corners of Kansas and Oklahoma. It was developed partly on 200-acres owned by a farmer named John C. Webb who drew up plans for a town in September 1875. He incorporated his self-named city in December 1876 when it already had a population of 700. 

Mr. Webb knew the value of the land as he had discovered lead ore there while plowing. In this great age of the industrial revolution it did not take long for mining companies to start digging. By the late 1890s when this photo was taken there were over 700 mines located within the limits of Webb City and adjacent Carterville. The region was also rich in other minerals, especially zinc ore. By 1880, just a few years after its incorporation, Webb City's population more than doubled to 1,588. By 1890 it jumped 217.6% to 5,043 residents. After a decade it was 9,201 in the 1900 census and then 11,817 in 1910. 

In 2020 Webb City has a modest but respectable population of 13,031, but in the 1890s it was clearly a prosperous place with enough wealth for a photographer to make a good living producing fine photos like this one of a young woman with her guitar. 

The photographer's full name was Edwin Eveliegh Spracklen. Courtesy of information posed on the FindaGrave.com website, Edwin E. Spracklen was born in December 1853 on the Isle of Guernsey in the English Channel. As a child he immigrated with his family to London, Ontario where he evidently got a good Canadian practical education. He trained as a photographer in Chicago and after a period traveling around the west, Spracklen settled in Webb City opening his own photography studio there in 1880. He was remembered as an artistic photographer and dealer in picture frames and art sundries. In 1898 he was elected mayor of Webb City, a position he held of two years. He died in March 1941 at the age of 87 and is buried in the Webb City cemetery. 

We may never know the names of anonymous people in old photographs but sometimes we can make a sketch of their lives by learning more about the person behind the camera. I'd bet good money that Mr. Kurtz, Mr. Bannister, and Mr. Spracklen each got to hear their guitarists play a private concert in return for a beautiful photograph.

This is my contribution to Sepia Saturday

where things outside always look better
if you clean the windows.