A. A. Hart Stereographs of the Central Pacific Railroad, approximately 1864-1869

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Summary

Abstract:
This collection contains 372 stereographic photographs (including some variants and duplicates) by photographer A. A. Hart (1816-1908) that document the construction of the western half of first transcontinental railroad by the Central Pacific Railroad between 1864 and 1869. Hart served as the Central Pacific's first official photographer, and his images chronicle the advancement of the railroad over 742 miles from Newcastle, California, through the Sierra Nevada Mountains and into Nevada and Utah.
Extent:
2.14 Linear Feet (372 photographs in 2 boxes : prints on card mounts ; mounts 9 x 18 cm (stereograph format) + 20 copy prints in 1 additional box)
Language:
English.
Preferred citation:

A. A. Hart Stereographs of the Central Pacific Railroad. The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

Background

Scope and content:

This collection contains 372 stereographic photographs (including some variants and duplicates) by photographer A. A. Hart that document the construction of the western half of first transcontinental railroad by the Central Pacific Railroad between 1864 and 1869. The collection includes all but seven of the original series, numbered from 1 to 364 by Hart (lacking 193, 323, 333, 358, 359, 362, and 364).

Hart served as the Central Pacific's first official photographer, and his images chronicle the advancement of the railroad over 742 miles from Newcastle, California (in 1864), through the Sierra Nevada Mountains into Nevada and on to Utah, where he captured the ceremonial meeting of the two railroads at Promontory Point on May 10, 1869. The majority of the photographs are views of mountains, lakes, rivers, and forested areas (some with stumps from clear-cutting in the foreground), often with railroad tracks running through the center of the images. In addition, there are also images of locomotives, Chinese and other workers, equipment, bridges, tunnels, frontier and mining towns, construction camps, as well as some images of Native Americans, including Paiute and Shoshone Indians.

The stereographs in the collection include a variety of imprints on the card versos. The stereographs primarily contain Hart's own Sacramento imprint with series titles including:

  1. Scenes in the Sierra Nevada Mountains
  2. Scenes in the Valley of the Sacramento
  3. Scenes in the Washoe Range
  4. Scenes on the Humboldt River
  5. Scenes near Great Salt Lake

Interspersed in the collection are stereographs published without credit to Hart by Frank Durgan and Carleton E. Watkins. Three cards contain the imprint "Sierra Nevada Mountains, Photographed and Published by Frank Durgan" (numbers 17, 26, and 40), and approximately forty crediting Watkins variously as "C.E. Watkins," "Watkins' Pacific Railroad," and "Watkins' New Series."

Item titles transcribed from stereographs.

Biographical / historical:

Photographer Alfred A. Hart (1816-1908) was born in Norwich, Connecticut, on March 28, 1816. In the late 1830s, he studied art in New York City, and later worked in Connecticut and along the East Coast as a portrait painter and panoramic artist. In 1857, Hart made an initial foray into photography in a partnership with daguerreotypist Henry H. Bartlett in Hartford, Connecticut. Hart and his family moved to Cleveland, Ohio, in the early 1860s, and by 1863, Hart had begun operating as a traveling photographer in various California mining towns.

In 1864, Hart first began photographing the construction of the western half of the transcontinental railroad, and, in January 1866, the directors of the Central Pacific Railroad (CPRR) purchased 32 stereoscopic negatives from Hart. Hart subsequently acted as the official photographer for the railroad making a number of trips to document its progress in California, Nevada, and Utah. During the late 1860s, he published stereographs of the construction with his Sacramento imprint. When Hart left the company in 1870, the only complete set of his 364 published images, belonging to the CPRR itself, was dispersed. Sacramento photographer Frank Durgan and San Francisco photographer Carleton E. Watkins (who had replaced Hart as the official CPRR photographer in 1870) published Hart's images under their own imprints.

In the 1870s, Hart returned to painting, working as an artist in both New York City and San Francisco.

Hart died on March 5, 1908 in Alameda, California.

The Central Pacific Railroad Company (CPRR), led by president Leland Stanford and vice president Collis P. Huntington, was incorporated in Sacramento, California, on June 28, 1861. The Pacific Railroad Act, signed by President Abraham Lincoln on July 1, 1862, authorized the CPRR to build a railroad and telegraph line east from Sacramento and the Union Pacific Railroad Company to build west from Omaha, Nebraska. On January 8, 1863, the CPRR held the ceremonial groundbreaking in Sacramento, and the first track was laid in October 1863. Construction progressed eastward for the next six years, with track completed to Auburn, California, in May 1865; Cisco, California, in late 1866; and Reno, Nevada, in June 1868. On May 10, 1869, the eastern and western lines met at Promontory Summit, Utah, with the ceremonial final "golden spike" driven by Stanford.

Acquisition information:

The collection was assembled from various sources. In 1966, the Library received approximately 238 images as a donation from Elizabeth T. and Charles Yale.

Thirty-four stereographs were received from B. Tighe in 1970 (Nos. 8, 9, 38, 39, 64, 126, 128, 158, 187, 194, 197, 235, 251a, 260, 262a, 272a, 282, 282a, 288a, 306, 315, 317, 322, 327, 330, 337, 338, 340, 340a, 341, 342, 355, 356, and 357).

Fourteen stereographs were purchased from Mead Kibbey in 1995 (Nos. 127 and 131) and 1999 (Nos. 27, 41, 65, 82, 125, 131, 231, 239, 301, 302, 320, and 336), and one stereograph was received from Mead Kibbey as a gift in 2012 (No. 253).

Thirty-four stereographs were purchased by the Library Collectors' Council from Gene Quintana Fine Art in January 2013 (Nos. 17, 26, 40, 46, 95, 132, 140, 155a, 166, 200, 213, 219, 224, 230, 246, 261, 307, 309, 310, 311, 319, 324, 328, 335, 343, 344, 345, 346, 348, 349, 350, 352, 354, and 363).

Arrangement:

The collection is arranged numerically according to the numbers preceding the titles on the cards.

Rules or conventions:
Describing Archives: A Content Standard

Access and use

Restrictions:

Open to qualified researchers by prior application through the Reader Services Department. For more information, contact Reader Services.

Terms of access:

The Huntington Library does not require that researchers request permission to quote from or publish images of this material, nor does it charge fees for such activities. The responsibility for identifying the copyright holder, if there is one, and obtaining necessary permissions rests with the researcher.

Preferred citation:

A. A. Hart Stereographs of the Central Pacific Railroad. The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

Location of this collection:
1151 Oxford Road
San Marino, CA 91108, US
Contact:
(626) 405-2129
reference@huntington.org
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