Glass Plates Collection

In 1975, the Provincetown Public Library, which had been built and donated to the Town by Nathanial Freeman in 1873, nearly one hundred years earlier, was listed on the National Register of Historic Buildings. There quickly ensued a major renovation of the building to accommodate the increased use of the library over the years, and, in the process, the third floor, which had been originally designated as a rental floor by Freeman in order to produce income for the building's maintenance, revealing a cache of glass plates, or negatives, totaling approximately 2,800. These photographs had been taken by Nickerson, the first tenant of the library's third floor, and Smith, the two photographers forming a brief partnership for several years. By 1888, however, both Nickerson and Smith were gone from the library and the Order of Good Templars occupied the third floor space.

When the renovation began, therefore, in 1976, the many glass plates were discovered in remarkably good condition and were turned over to the Provincetown Historical Association, which then housed them in the Provincetown Heritage Museum, established by the town in 1975. It must be noted here that the Provincetown Historical Association was a private organization which became the "friends of the museum" and which assisted in the funding of a number of significant projects including that of the construction of the half-scale model of the fishing schooner "Rose Dorothea." Once brought together in the Heritage Museum, the plates were thoroughly cleaned and then archived and finally stored. The person accomplishing this huge task was one of the young custodians of the museum at that time, native son Mark J. Perry. The process Perry used was very time-consuming and required two summers of work, from 1977-1978, to complete. The cleaning and cataloguing were finished on July 25, 1978, and it turned out that Mark had been able to identify half of the glass plates, providing an exact and categorical inventory to accompany the collection. The rest of the plates still remain as an unidentified population of late Victorian individuals. In time, perhaps, family and/or serendipitous connections may reveal the identity of a few more of those anonymous persons to a known presence in Provincetown and, possibly other, Lower Cape communities.

In addition to Nickerson and Smith, a photographer by the name of Irving Rosenthal, who became manager of Nickerson's business, was also actively documenting the community. At the time of Nickerson's death in 1890, Rosenthal took over his business, which included, of course, the glass plates that were extant in the files. Lastly, a fourth photographer by the name of Louis Snow was busy recording Provincetown on glass plates in the latter part of the nineteenth century. A good deal younger than the three previously mentioned, he was also a musician like his grandfather Obadiah who had been choir master and organist for the Center Methodist Episcopal Church, later the Provincetown Heritage Museum and today, the Provincetown Public Library. Thus Snow's glass plates have had a sentimental return to their historic genesis in a certain sense. Added to his cultural status as a musician, Obadiah had established a practical business as a dealer in music, pianos, organs and household furnishings at 250 Commercial Street, and Louis, his son, did very well carrying this on to augment his income as a photographer. Louis Snow lived until the age of ninety-one and when he died in 1963, he left his collection of neatly labeled and preserved glass plates to this sons Stanley and Morris Snow who eventually donated some of them to the Provincetown Historical Association and to the Cape Cod National Seashore, but the majority of which they gave to their good friend John Bell, local historian and writer. John used this collection to augment his articles on local history, especially in the "Provincetown Advocate," for a number of years, but when he became ill in 1981, he passed the Snow collection to Irma Ruckstuhl who used selections from this resource to create an outstanding compendium of old Provincetown from early photographs.*

Further additions to the Provincetown collection of the glass plates have come from photographer and poet Paul Koch who donated approximately 128 glass negatives to the Heritage Museum in 1990, comprised of plates from Nickerson, Smith and Rosenthal and some from John Bell. Another collection was given to the Town through the Heritage Museum in 1976, shortly after the museum became operational by a former Provincetown Library assistant, Natalie Patrick. A few of these plates were printed at that same time and used in the museum's exhibits. Essentially, all four photographers, represented by this huge 19th century collection, documented the thriving community of some 4,500 souls just before the great fishing era in Provincetown began its steady decline. All of these valued remembrances have been miraculously stored and transferred over a period of approximately one hundred and twenty years. Fragile but durable, bearing sharp, detailed and descriptive images of the past, they comprise one of Provincetown's most valuable, once-hidden, treasures of the Victorian era, now no longer hidden but available to the world at large.

Josephine C. Del Deo

*Irma Ruckstuhl, "Old Provincetown in the Early Photographs," Dover Publications, Inc., 1987

John D. Bell, "History of Provincetown Public Library," Provincetown-250 Years, Provincetown Historical Association, 1977