William Henry Jackson (1843-1942) This page: Top: Waiting for the Sunday Boat. Bottom: Metamora at Silver Springs. Both photos by William Henry Jackson, courtesy of Library of Congress. Opposite: Top: The Sunken Forest by H. R. Bezant. Courtesy of Silver River Museum. Bottom: Henry R. Bezant preparing items at the Florida State Museum in 1957. Courtesy of the University of Florida and the Florida Museum.
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Although Jackson was born and died in New York he was not an idle man. He was a painter, photographer, illustrator, publisher and explorer. He served in the Civil War as a young man and headed west immediately afterwards to start his career and extensive travels. While Jackson is best known for his images of Western landscapes (he published the first photographs of what is now Yellowstone National Park), he was a world traveler. Thankfully, he also took time to record images of everyday people and scenes. Over the winter of 19001901, Jackson traveled along the Atlantic Coast from Virginia to Florida. While in Florida, he visited the Ocklawaha River, Silver River and Silver Springs aboard the small but ornate steamboat Princess, which he chartered out of Palatka. It was on this trip that he captured iconic scenes of steamboats at Silver Springs and a few wonderfully candid images of locals waiting at the docks. Other images capture the Princess with crewmen and a large camera on the deck. His work for Western railroads as a photographer led to an exhibition featuring Native Americans and scenes of the American West at the famous 1893 world’s fair in Chicago. The next year he joined the World Transportation Commission as a photographer to travel the globe between 1894 and 1896. During this expedition he created more than 900 images in North and East Africa, the Middle East, India, Australia, East Asia, Europe and Central and South America. The cameras Jackson carried used fragile glass plates of various sizes (the one in the photo of the Princess likely used an 18x22 inch glass plate). Although primitive by today’s standards, the large glass plates resulted in detailed and sharp images. Developing the glass plates into photographs was complicated and time consuming. The process is known as wetcollodion emulsion and requires extensive experience to master. Jackson was, in fact, a master and, between 1870 and the late 1920s, he created 53,879 glass plate images, of which 30,000 eventually went to the Library of Congress and can still be researched today.