Photos from a collection of
Harry Showalter's dry-plate negatives
Bruce has his grandfather's photography equipment, including a 5"x7" view camera, tripod and about 100 dry-plate negatives. There is an 1891 patent date on the lens, indicating that the camera is over 100 years old. Several years ago, he had about 50 of the negatives printed. They are primarily pictures of people, including many group shots. They also include numerous pictures of buildings and homes in Phoenixville, PA, some of which were taken on the 100 block of Church St. where Harry lived as a child.
A number of the pictures are of Grandfather Harry at work, with his wife Eva Graham Showalter and other Graham family members. There may be some Showalters, but we believe that many of the people in the other pictures are Brownbacks. Unfortunately, we cannot identify them. To help us in that endeavor, we have created this page.
If you can identify someone in a picture, please click the Identity
label for that picture. This will launch your email program to send
Bruce* an email with your information. The subject line will be
pre-filled with photo identification information. Please do not modify
it. Simply enter your information in the body of the message. Thank you.
* NOTE: The e-mail will be sent to Marge, 29 Jun 2012
To keep the download times short, the pictures are grouped 2 per page. There are 22 pictures from Grandfather Harry's collection and another 2 that were just acquired from Bruce's mother.
Before moving on to the picture's from Grandfather Harry's collection, we are posting 3 other pictures that were taken by Ralph F. Channel, a photographer in Phoenixville, PA. In its September 1999 newsletter, The Historical Society of the Phoenixville Area had an article on the history of photography in Phoenixville. Mr. Channel operated his photography studio during the 1860's and 1870's. Using this information along with Jacob's birth date of 12 April 1824 and guessing that Jacob was in his 50's when the photograph of him was taken we can say that the photographs most likely date to the late 1870's.
We have included these pictures in order to establish an association to the pictures that will follow. Two are actually pictures that Grandfather Harry took of photographs of his parents, Jacob and Martha Brownback Showalter. We do not know the identity of the woman in the third picture. We have smaller pictures of Harry's parents that are identical in style and format to that of the picture of the unknown woman, so we feel that all three were possibly taken at the same time. Also, the small photograph of Martha was printed from the same negative used to print the larger photograph in the picture. Pay special attention the picture of Martha before moving on to the next page.
