Posted by Greg Jones on Thu May 20 22:35:41 2004: IP Address: 64.12.117.20
When I visited this exhibit almost 2 years ago I identified a photo of
Florence Regina Cheuvront.
There is a possibility that there are other photos of Cheuvronts in the exhibit also.
Rgds.
Greg Jones
http://www.wonderfulwv.com/gallery.cfm?menu=september
He Captured the Life of Ravenswood: The Mysterious Legacy of Henry Clay Fleming
By Lucia K. Hyde
Photographs by HENRY CLAY FLEMING Photographs courtesy of MASSILLON MUSEUM
Did this dapper young gentleman put his own boots on?
Next
An infant in petticoats, a coquettish young woman baring her shoulder, men with guns, women with babies, grandmothers and grandfathers, farmers and bankersÐwho are the people who peer from the nearly forgotten photographs of Henry Clay Fleming?
The Massillon Museum in Massillon, Ohio, recently held an exhibit entitled Ravenswood: The Discovery of a Photographic Legacy, which featured mysterious pictures taken in a Ravenswood, West Virginia, portrait studio at the turn of last century. The 90 photographs portray life in the small river town. Farmers pose with stern lips and steady eyes. Members of a hunting party display their guns and a freshly slain rabbit. Photographs of women in bustles and feathered bonnets present a striking contrast to that of a weary-eyed mother wearing the plain clothes of poverty. Banjos and whiskey bottles, cigarettes and pistols give many of the men an air of rugged independence. Yet for all the clues to early, small-town life that the photographs reveal, not one offers the identity of the person pictured. Despite efforts of the Massillon Museum to uncover relatives of the subjects, no one has identified any of the photographs.
In fact, when first discovered, the glass-plate negatives, from which the museum restored the photographs, presented a mystery of their own. In 1984, museum director John Klassen found wooden crates filled with five-by-seven-inch negatives languishing in a barn near Athens, Ohio. Over time, humidity had glued the tightly-packed negatives together into blocks of glass. Uncertain of what the negatives depicted, Klassen donated the crates to the museum. Museum staff and volunteers let the negatives dry out for more than a year before attempting to separate, clean, and catalogue the plates. When they finally pried the negatives apart, they found almost 2,000 portraits of exceptionally high quality. While most of the plates had suffered water damage, the disarming expressions came through with the charm and clarity of ages past.
'They are wonderful imagesÐvery direct, very honest,' says Klassen.
The origin of the negatives remained uncertain until museum staff uncovered two letters that enabled them to identify the photographer as Henry Clay Fleming. A shipping label on one of the crates and a negative of the Ravenswood railroad depot helped researchers pinpoint Fleming's former hometown. Museum staff spent hours canvassing the Ravenswood library and town records for information about Fleming. They managed to locate Louise Noll, Fleming's niece, and another relative, Bill Fleming, who helped them piece together the photographer's history.
Born in 1845, Henry Clay Fleming spent his early adult life shuttling mail in a skiff between Ravenswood and Parkersburg to earn enough money to start a photography business. While he spent most of his life photographing, he did not open his portrait studio until he was well into his fifties. He finally purchased a house in downtown Ravenswood, two blocks from the Ohio River. The roomy, Victorian house functioned as both his home and studio. From approximately 1915 until his death in 1942, Fleming served as Ravenswood's lone professional photographer.
In his studio on Walnut Street, he captured the life of Ravenswood. ' What I really like about his pictures is how direct and unaffected they are,' says Klassen. '
When you look at other formal portraits of the era, there's more of a stiffness. He just seems to let people be themselvesÐwhich sounds so simple but is even rare today.'
Fleming also used natural lighting, which gave his subjects a soft, luminous beauty.
He continued to use glass-plate negatives well after most photographers had switched to celluloid film. His later negatives represent some of the last glass-plate technique used in the early twentieth century.
In order to turn the negatives into photographs, museum staff digitally photographed each one. They then loaded the digital images into a computer capable of converting them from negative to positive. Using computer technology, experts repaired significant scratches and blemishes without removing water stains or other signs of age. Before printing the images on archival paper, they added sepia, a brown tint used in the early 1900s, to make the photographs appear as close to the original prints as possible.
The Massillon Museum has recently loaded the 90 images used in the exhibit onto a CD. They hope to make the CD available to libraries in the Ravenswood area, so that the public can help identify the mysterious figures gazing from these endearing photographs.
Freelance writer and West Virginia native Lucia K. Hyde especially enjoys writing about people and places of interest in her home state.
Can you identify any of the people in Henry Clay Fleming' s photographs? If so, please write to us c/o Cannon Graphics, P.O. Box 5310, Charleston, West Virginia 25361. We hope to print a follow-up story in a future issue.
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