Where Is It?

[Eva Elisabeth]

The lampshades really look down turned to me - I added a clipping next to my examples - where the black frame is in the background it really compares to the left (down) version. And both examples are of the 1950s and hold electric bulbs.

[L Verge]

The shades in your two examples give themselves away right away as being mid-20th century, but I'm seeing the ones in the Edwards' photo as much wider and turned upwards. Unless the photo can be enlarged and resolution improved, I think we will have to rule it as unknown date and energy source.

[Steve]

The photo comes from Barton's book, The Women Lincoln Loved, doesn't it? Did Barton take the photo himself? If he didn't, did he leave any indication where he got it from?

[RJNorton]

(11-02-2019 02:13 AM)Steve Wrote:  The photo comes from Barton's book, The Women Lincoln Loved, doesn't it? Did Barton take the photo himself? If he didn't, did he leave any indication where he got it from?

Yes, that is where I got it. All it says under the photo is "The parlor of the house in which they were married" and "photograph by Eugene J. Hall, Oak Park, Illinois." No date or other information is given.

There is a Find-A-Grave page for Mr. Hall here:

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/1477...udson-hall

[L Verge]

(11-02-2019 03:57 AM)RJNorton Wrote:  

(11-02-2019 02:13 AM)Steve Wrote:  The photo comes from Barton's book, The Women Lincoln Loved, doesn't it? Did Barton take the photo himself? If he didn't, did he leave any indication where he got it from?

Yes, that is where I got it. All it says under the photo is "The parlor of the house in which they were married" and "photograph by Eugene J. Hall, Oak Park, Illinois." No date or other information is given.

There is a Find-A-Grave page for Mr. Hall here:

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/1477...udson-hall

The obit for Mr. Hall gives us a bit of dates to speculate upon. Although he traveled a great deal before moving to Illinois, we can speculate that the photo was taken after that move. The obit says he had lived in Oak Park for forty years before his death in 1932, so that would place his move about 1892 and support the theory that the photo dates to the late-1800s.

Next question: When was Barton's book published? The photo would have been taken before that - wonder how long Barton worked on it?

[Rob Wick]

Laurie,
It was written in 1927. I have all of Barton's papers with Bobbs-Merrill (his main publisher) but they are in a container somewhere in my office. I'll try to go through them later in the day (I have an 11th birthday party to attend for my great niece).

Barton's books on Lincoln started appearing in 1920 when The Soul of Abraham Lincoln came out, so it's possible that he could have had the photo taken anytime between the time he started working on that to 1927. Barton was interested in Lincoln long before his books appeared (I have a letter that a friend of Barton's wrote to Ida Tarbell in the 1890s asking her about reading some of Barton's stuff and Tarbell never followed up on it). I wonder if it's possible that Hall had the photo in his collection and Barton knew about it? Given that Oak Park was Barton's home base and he likely would have known Hall, such is a possibility.

Best
Rob

[L Verge]

Answering my own question as to when Barton's book was publlished - 1927. So we're placing that photo having been taken prior to that.

If you want to spend a cold day online with the University of Chicago's Library and its collection of William E. Barton's Papers, have fun - https://www.lib.uchicago.edu/e/scrc/find...L.BARTONWE 48 boxes with multiple folders in each and at least 95% devoted to his Lincoln studies. I even learned that Barton purchased some of the Oldroyd collection. I will say that the Library's online catalog of the collection is one of the most detailed that I have seen. I tried in vain to find that specific photograph, but there is just general mention of photographs, nothing specific.

There is one listing under works of other authors that I would love to see: In 1927, an Albert T. Reid wrote Boston Corbett, The Man of Mystery of the Lincoln Drama. I'm not sure it was even published, but it is in Box 27, folder 3, if anyone just happens to stop by... LOL

[RJNorton]

(11-02-2019 10:36 AM)L Verge Wrote:  The obit for Mr. Hall gives us a bit of dates to speculate upon. Although he traveled a great deal before moving to Illinois, we can speculate that the photo was taken after that move. The obit says he had lived in Oak Park for forty years before his death in 1932, so that would place his move about 1892 and support the theory that the photo dates to the late-1800s.

This is sheer speculation on my part:

Many people who live in Oak Park (where I grew up) get the Chicago Tribune, and possibly that newspaper carried an article saying "the house where Lincoln was married" was going to be demolished. Perhaps Mr. Hall then traveled to Springfield to take photos of the house (exterior house pic also in Barton's book) and parlor before the home was torn down. The Tribune has often carried Lincoln-related articles throughout the years. This could date the photo to around 1916 or early 1917 before the home came down and before the furnishings were removed. Once again, sheer speculation.

[Steve]

I found a bunch of photographs by Hall in a magazine called Country Life in America. Here's an article from 1910 where Hall took photos of another house for an article in the magazine:

https://books.google.com/books?id=PEikIX...se&f=false

Since both men lived at the same place, maybe Barton hired Hall to take photos of the house.

Here's the New York Public Library's page on Hall:

https://pic.nypl.org/constituents/3368

If that's any help.

[L Verge]

I took a wild stab and asked Google when electricity came to Springfield, IL. The history is not great, but Wikipedia focuses on City Water & Light being founded there on January 2, 1911. It would seem that widespread installation to homes would have taken several years, so it is possible that the Edwardses' home did have electricity by the time it was demolished in 1917 -- but I am still doubtful.

[Rob Wick]

I finally found the Bobbs-Merrill files on Barton's The Women Lincoln Loved, and it's going to take me longer than I anticipated to find more than just a few crumbs on it. One of the things I uncovered in the book's publicity materials is a statement by Barton that reads:

I have grown very weary of the companionship of these ladies, but also very fond of them. This is much more of a book than planned when I wrote it out as the expansion of a lecture in 1921.

There is also a typed layout of the book that mentions the pictures, but unfortunately it gives no date as to when it was taken. I have three folders about two inches thick from 1926, 1927, and 1928 to go through, which won't happen until some time tomorrow.

That's all for now.

Best
Rob

[Rob Wick]

For the past two hours I have been crafting a reply and in the accidental flick of a mouse I lost the whole d@#n thing. I'll try again tomorrow.

Best
Rob

[Steve]

Rob, I've had that happen with many a computer email or message disappearing into the other in the blink of an eye. So, I can really feel your pain in all the time writing wasted.

Thanks for all your effort in looking through your copies of Barton's papers on this question.

[Rob Wick]

Thanks, Steve. It was certainly frustrating.

First, let me say this. There is no direct reference to the picture taken by Hall or to Hall himself in the Bobbs-Merrill papers. I can’t sit here and tell you that these are the only letters between Barton and the publisher given that I have some letters from the University of Chicago collection that were copied by a researcher I hired in Chicago. I asked him to find material related to Bobbs-Merrill but limited him to eight hours, so I have no idea what he left out. I will add that the Bobbs-Merrill papers, which come from the Lilly Library at Indiana University, are the company files so one would expect that they are complete in terms of what Barton sent them, but not necessarily in what they sent Barton, although I have to say the files seem to me rather comprehensive. All told it measures about one linear foot.

That said, another anomaly arises. The files from 1925 to 1926 average about two or two and one-half inches thick. The 1927 file is about ¾ of an inch to one inch thick. I can’t explain why that is. There’s nothing in the files that gives any clues as to why this might be.

That said, I can still provide a brief history of the publication of the book.

The first mention by Barton as to his interest in writing the book came in a letter to Bobbs-Merrill in April of 1926. Barton wrote to David Chambers, vice-president of Bobbs-Merrill, “Now I have two or three small Lincoln affairs in mind, none so unimportant as “A Beautiful Blunder” but small compared with what I have in the Life and in comparison with what I have in mind to do in a popular one volume Life of Lincoln, after Beveridge is out and Warren is out and the sale of my two volume work slacks. They are, “The Women Lincoln Loved” “Lucy Hanks” “The Lineage of Lincoln” and “Lincoln and Walt Whitman.” Chambers was enthusiastic about the planned projects, but nothing was discussed further, and Barton was busy reading proofs of his children’s book about Lincoln called “A Great and Good Man.”

One thing I noticed in the correspondence about that book is that Barton took the lead in obtaining photographs and illustrations, noting that he had “plenty of pictures” that could be used, but adding that he preferred to see illustrations as well.

The next mention in 1926 comes in July when Barton notified Chambers that The Ladies Home Journal had accepted for its February, 1927 issue the chapter Barton was writing on Ann Rutledge. “This pleases me,” Barton wrote. “I will now cut the insides of the book into chapters and throw each child to a separate shelf.” Barton was anxious to bring the book out, and hoped for a Spring 1927 publication date. However, Chambers urged Barton to slow down, noting that he would be competing with himself if he brought too many books out at once. Chambers wrote, “THE WOMEN LINCOLN LOVED sounds to me like a popular book. We want to do it of course, and hope we may have it for next fall, the fall of 1927, in which case LINCOLN AND WHITMAN can wait for the spring of 1928. But I don’t think we ought to try to bring out two of your books, and particularly two Lincoln books, in one period, and you haven’t forgotten that we are scheduling THE GREAT AND GOOD MAN for this spring. One book a season is really all that the trade can absorb.”

By December of 1926, Barton was sending to Bobbs-Merrill various chapters of the book, most of which had been published in different magazines, including one on Lucy Hanks that Liberty Magazine accepted and another in the Dearborn Independent. It appears to me, then, that Barton was working on it piecemeal, whenever he found a free moment.

The only reference I found to the photos in 1927 was in a six-page memorandum from Chambers to Barton dated March 8, 1927. In a postscript, Chambers wrote “The illustrations should not be fanciful or imaginative. They should consist of full portraits available, pictures of homes—that sort of thing. Do you agree? Will you start assembling material?” The papers include no response from Barton. The book was published in October, 1927.

Basically, that’s all I found in the Barton papers. Not really much in the way of help,

Best
Rob

[RJNorton]

THANK YOU for all your efforts, Rob!!

I came across another web page which says the home was torn down in 1918, not 1917 like the other page I read. This page has some interesting information:

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++

"The Edwards home was built in 1836. Episcopalian Bishop Rev. George Seymour bought the home in 1884 and converted it to St. Agatha School, a day and boarding school for girls. St. Agatha’s closed in 1905.

The home was demolished in 1918 to make way for state government’s Centennial Building (later renamed the Howlett Building), and the northwest corner of the Howlett Building now occupies much of what was the Edwards home’s footprint. (Part of the Capitol can be seen in the background of the photo above). By 1918, officials felt the home already had been so extensively remodeled that it had lost most of its historic significance.

“The building has undergone much remodeling since that (the Lincolns’) time, according to persons conversant with its history,” the Springfield News-Record reported, “and there has been some dispute as to whether the room remains in which the wedding took place. That fact and the impracticality of moving the massive old building caused the abandonment of plans to preserve it as a relic.”

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

https://sangamoncountyhistory.org/wp/?p=1611