Granville Then & Now – February 24, 2022 – Glass plate negative photographer identified

Glass plate negative photographer identified

By Erik Pekar, Town Historian

The interior of the A.C. Smith bakery and ice cream parlor. This photo, taken in 1908 by Nellie J. Lewis, led to the identification of Lewis as the photographer who took the pictures comprising a group of more than 150 glass plate negatives that are in the Granville historical collections.

One unique group of items at the Granville historical collections, housed in the historian’s office in the town hall building, is that of the glass plate negatives taken by a Granville photographer in the early 20th century. The set of photos show scenes of Granville and Middle Granville, including business buildings, churches, events and members of local families.

The group of glass plate negatives was discovered in early 1979 by Donna Sica, who was working with Granville and Washington County for their historic building survey. Sica visited an auction in Warrensburg and encountered someone who had the negatives. She told her discovery to a group of people in Granville who had just formed the Granville Heritage Society. The new group had no funds, but a member bought the collection of photos for the Heritage Society.

Prints of the glass plate negatives were made under the auspices of Heritage Society members in the 1979 to 1982 period; these prints were numbered in two series, a regular series and a series suffixed with “A.” The full number of negatives has never been counted; more than 150 were “projected” and printed out to photo paper in 1979, and estimates of the full number at the time rose as high as 500. The photos were estimated to have been taken in the early 1900s, with the latest potentially dating to 1912. The members had no idea of the photographer, and it appears unlikely that a Heritage Society member figured out the photographer’s identity.

For more than 40 years, the photographer of the glass plate negatives remained a mystery. There was no information with them, and evidently no member ever found any link to other materials. The Granville Heritage Society went dormant in the early 1980s. It reformed three times in the next 30 years, never gaining much solid support. Its final members eventually voted to dissolve the group.

The identity of the photographer went unknown until last year. This was photo 33A, depicting a room with an ice cream counter and tall stools. It was identified in notes at the time as being of the Cavoretto ice cream and fruit store. However, the Cavoretto store was in a building with parallel walls; the pictured photo clearly shows the left wall diagonally getting closer to the right wall the further towards the photo’s background.

As it turns out, photo 33A from the glass plate negatives appeared elsewhere, namely the Granville Sentinel’s “Special Trade Edition” of Oct. 16, 1908. There, the photo is identified as the A.C. Smith ice cream parlor, then located in the L.C. Thorne block, approximately on the site of the 1 West Main Street building.

The discovery of the glass plate negative photo appearing in the 1908 Special Trade Edition was a significant discovery; it led to identifying the photographer. The 1908 special Sentinel included features on many of Granville’s businesses and their owners. This included a feature on the photographer Nellie J. Lewis, whose studio was on Church Street in Granville; it noted that practically all the photos in the Special Trade Edition had been taken by Lewis, and that she had devoted her efforts to the practice for 12 years (since 1896).

Nellie J. Lewis was the daughter of Jacob Sykes, who had a farm north of the village of Granville. She married Tom Lewis, a Civil War veteran. For some years they resided in Orwell, Vermont, where they had three children, Frederick, Harry and Grace. Mr. Lewis predeceased her. Nellie Lewis was living with her daughter Grace in Glens Falls when she passed away in 1942. It is unknown how her glass plate negatives wound up in Warrensburg by 1979.

The identifying of the circa 1908 A.C. Smith ice cream parlor photo with photo 33A from the glass plate negatives concludes an over 40-year mystery, which surely confounded the inaugural Granville Heritage Society members. However, the collection would surely not have been printed out, and eventually, after many years, have its photographer identified as Nellie J. Lewis, had it not been for the efforts of acquiring the glass plate negatives by the original members of the Granville Heritage Society in 1979.