u/Beneficial-Force7592

Ohio historian here bringing some love from the Buckeye State!

Yes, we're technically Appalachia. Even a lot of our own residents here forget that almost one-third of our state is part of the Appalachian foothills. More importantly, one of our most famous photographers specialized in capturing portraits of Appalachian families and life in rural Ohio and West Virginia at the turn of the century. These are my favorite ones, but the link to the entire collection is at Ohio Memory.

For those who want more context:

Albert J. Ewing was born in 1870 in Adams Township, Washington County, about ten miles from Marietta. In the mid-1890s he loaded a camera and a stack of glass plate negatives onto the Water Queen. It was a showboat that worked the Ohio River. He started taking pictures of whoever would pay him. He spent the next sixteen years traveling the hills of southeastern Ohio and central West Virginia as an itinerant photographer. His brother Frank even joined the business at some point!

Itinerant photography was a service trade. Rural families who lived fifty miles from the nearest portrait studio couldn't go to the photographer, so the photographer came to them. Ewing hauled his equipment by wagon, by river, and on foot into communities along the Ohio, the Muskingum River, and their tributaries. When he arrived, people lined up. They brought their babies, their dogs, their fiddles, any trinkets they wanted to have taken with their portrait. Ewing charged for each sitting, printed from the glass plate, and moved on to the next town.

But he also shot the things that people only photograph once. Memorial portraits of the recently dead were standard practice at the turn of the century, and Ewing took those commissions too. In a world where most families owned zero photographs of their living members (remember, photography was a relatively recent invention still, and drawings were prohibitively expensive), a portrait taken after death might be the only image that existed of a person at all.

By 1916, city directories list Ewing as a salesman. Whatever pulled him out of photography, he left behind 5,055 glass plate negatives, still packed in the original dry plate boxes he'd bought years earlier. At some point the plates ended up in an Ohio antique store, where a collector from Illinois bought them. In 1982, that collector donated the entire collection to the Ohio Historical Society (now the Ohio History Connection). The plates sat largely unseen for three decades before the first exhibition went up in 2013. Many of the negatives have been digitized and are available through Ohio Memory. These are all from that collection.

If you're into old photography, definitely enjoy browsing the whole album! I really love the young couple photos and some of his landscape ones, but there's always a few gems that tell great stories. You can get more info for each photo, too, that way. Cheers!