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ArrangementThere is no apparent arrangement scheme for the material. OverviewThis collection consists of correspondence, sketches, manuscripts, and photographs created by Stoddard and accumulated by Maitland DeSormo. The correspondence mainly concerns advertising in Stoddard's guidebook and notes and correspondence of Maitland DeSormo regarding Stoddard. Also included are Stoddard's calling cards; account books containing record of copyrights; guidebooks; hotel information forms; lecture clippings, notices and programs; a diary of a trip Stoddard took to the Adirondacks (1873); and Adirondack Mountain Reserve memoranda. There are also U.S. Patent Office certificates and specifications for improvement on photographic apparatus and for improvement on electrical trolleys; receipts for photographs and maps deposited with the Library o Congress; and copies of Arthur Winslow's Stadia Surveying and John C. Trautwin's The Civil Engineers Pocketbook. Manuscripts of Stoddard's which include Jan the Golden (4 copies); Marsa Phil (2 copies); The Hudson River from the Mountains to the Sea; The Cruise of the Friesland, 1895; and The Adirondacks (contai mounted photos). Also included are Stoddard wood engravings; map sketches; a pencil sketch for The Adirondack Illustrated; map proofs for guidebooks including maps of Lake Placid, Upper and Lower SaranacLake, and Lake Champlain from Westport to Burlington (box 6, folders 1a-17); and maps of Keene Valley; AdirondacMountains; a Verplank Colvin reconnaissance map of Tallow or Blue Mountain Lake (published by Weed, Parson anCo.); Herkimer, Hamilton and Montgomery Counties; and Whiteface - Saranac River. Biographical SketchSeneca Ray Stoddard, landscape photographer and conservationist, was born in Wilton (Saratoga County), N.Y. in 1843. He was the son of Charles Stoddard, a part-time farmer who also did craft work and lumbering, and Julia Ray Stoddard. Stoddard's childhood home (the Wilton hamlet of Dimick's Corners) was located near Mount McGregor, the highest peak of the Adirondacks' Palmer Range. Following the deaths of Julia Stoddard and an infant daughter in 1854, Charles Stodda married Laura Cook and two years later moved his family north. By the close of the decade they were living in Burke (Franklin County), N.Y. in Hawk's Hollow, a hamlet on the northern edge of the Adirondacks. Stoddard attended common school in Burke through the age of seventeen. He probably began some training as a carriage painter in Burke as well. In 1861, his family moved to the Albany-T area. The following year, Stoddard began work as a journeyman carriage painter for the Gilbert Car Company on Green Island in Watervliet (Albany County), N.Y. Gilbert, a manufacturer of railway cars, employed "ornamental painters" to decorate its coaches with painted panels of landscapes and other scenes. In 1864, Stoddard left the Albany-Troy area to establish his own painting business the Adirondack lumber-processing community of Glens Falls (Warren County), N.Y. By 1867, Stoddar had ceased advertising as a "Carriage, House, Sign, Banner, and Ornamental" painter, and October of that year, a local newspaper praised stereographs of Glens Falls scenes executed by "Mr. Stoddard, Photographer." In May 1868, Stoddard married Helen Augusta Potter, the daughter of a wealthy Glens Falls insurance agent and merchant. The couple had two sons. By the summer of 1868, Stoddard was making stereo images of nearby Lake George. He used the wet-plate technology of the day, which required that a photographer of outdoor scenes transport not only a camera weighing fifty pounds or more but also an array of chemicals to "fix" the glass plate negatives after exposure. In 1870 Stoddard lived on Elm Street in Glens Falls, the site of his home and studio for the remainder of his career, and claimed the profession of "landscape painter." Over the next few years he painte and photographed Lake George views. His photographs of these years resemble the landscapes paint by the noted Hudson River School artist John Kensett. In 1873, Stoddard photographed and painted in the Adirondacks and published the first of a long-running series of guidebooks to the region, The Adirondacks Illustrated, in which he expressed Emersonian beliefs about the goodness, beauty, and healing properties of unspoiled wilderness. By 1875, he was selling his images tourists in area hotels while his painting career was ending. During the 1870s, Stoddard also wrote for the Glens Falls and Troy newspapers (mainly accounts of Adirondack trips and humorous sketches) and took an active role in the New York State Temperanc movement, becoming "Grand Worthy Patriarch" of the state organization's "Easte Division" in 1875. Raised a Methodist, Stoddard hinted at spiritualist beliefs in his earliest writings Toward the close of his life, he turned away from traditional religious forms, preferring to worship only "Nature's Temple." From his early writings through the later ones, he also revealed an opposition toward urban living that carried over into antipathies toward both large industrial concerns a immigrant groups. Through the 1870s and into the mid-1880s, Stoddard made hundreds of landscape images on Lake George and in the Adirondacks, also working to some extent in New Hampshire's White Mountains, on the Maine seacoast, in the lower Hudson Valley, and along the Saint Lawrence River. Though Stoddard used the more rapid dry-plate photographic method from the early 1880s, his body of work from the fifteen-year period forms a stylistic whole of serene, light-filled, predominantly horizontal views, with people and buildings treated as sharply defined, often dramatically highlighted forms that are frequently appreciated as abstract, geometric shapes. His views of the Adirondacks in particular preserve the region's social and architectural history at a time when wealthy tourists an elaborate "camps" and hotels were first making their appearance in a region of bark huts, hermits, Native American hunters, logging camps, and hardscrabble farms. In 1878, Stoddard served as a photographer on the New York State Survey of the Adirondacks, where he gained sufficient knowledge to publish his own popular "Map of the Adirondacks" two years later. In 1881, he published another successful map of Lake George. His interest in technology led him to invent in 1882 a camera attachment for use in dry-plate photography and to perfect the "magnesium flash" for taking night photographs. In 1890, he successfully tested this flash in New York City, capturing striking night views of the Statue of Liberty and the Washington Square Arch. From the mid-1880s through the 1890s, Stoddard made a series of photographic trips to Europe, the Near East, the American West and South, and Alaska, achieving financial success by presenting "illustrated" lectures of his travels to audiences throughout the northeastern Unite States. During this era, he lectured on the Adirondacks as well, showing lantern slides of the early images. His photographs of the Adirondack region fixed the image of the Adirondacks as an earthly paradise in the public mind. In 1891, he helped win a political victory with these images; he delivered h illustrated lecture on the Adirondacks to the sitting New York State Legislature and swayed the body to pass the Adirondack Park Bill. After his wife's death in 1906, Stoddard launched a Glens Falls-based magazine, "Stoddard's Northern Monthly" (later "Stoddard's Adirondack Monthly") with articles and short stories advocating wilderness conservation. In 1908, he married Emily Doty, the family's longtime housekeeper; they had no children. After the magazine failed (1908), Stoddard completed a hydrographic chart of Lake George and his Auto-Road Map of the Adirondacks and the Champlain and Hudson Valleys. Stoddard died in Glens Falls in 1917 [Source: American National Biography (2004)]. Administrative InformationCustodial History The collection was purchased from Maitland DeSormo. Processing InformationThis collection's description was enhanced as a part of the New York State Archives Environmental HistoryVirtual Research Collection Project, 2004. The National Endowment for the Humanities provided funding for this project. Use of CollectionAccess Restrictions There are no restrictions regarding access to or use of the material. Available Alternate Formats Some of the maps in Map Folder 2 are photocopies. Related InformationRelated Material Stoddard [Collection of photographs mostly of the Adirondacks: Part of the Maitland C. DeSormo collection] (PRI4963) and Adirondack Collection, 1843-1985 (SC17501), New York State Library, Albany, N.Y.; Stoddardphotographs transferred to the Adirondack Museum Historical Photograph Collection and the William West Durant papers (MS 63-258) at the Adirondack Museum Library, Blue Mountain Lake, N.Y.; the Stoddard collection at the Chapman Museum, Glens Falls, N.Y. Other Finding Aids An inventory is available at the repository. Access TermsCorporate NamesSubjects Photographers Geographic Names Adirondack Mountains (N.Y.) - Guidebooks Genre/Form Photographs Engraving Sketches Maps Manuscripts Function Personal Names DeSormo, Maitland Container List
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